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Canada's national weekly current affairs magazineFri, 09 Dec 2016 17:16:23 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.2Why Boris Johnson is the perfect pick to be foreign ministerhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/why-boris-johnson-is-the-perfect-pick-to-be-foreign-minister/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/why-boris-johnson-is-the-perfect-pick-to-be-foreign-minister/#commentsThu, 14 Jul 2016 23:47:34 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=900189Theresa May's decision to name the bumbling, boorish Boris her top diplomat is a perfect reflection of the politics of modern Britain

Newly appointed British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson leaves his home in north London, as new Prime Minister Theresa May prepared to put the finishing touches to her top team, Thursday July 14, 2016. (Lauren Hurley/PA via AP)

Not long ago, in a column for the Daily Telegraph, Boris Johnson wrote about Tony Blair’s upcoming trip to Congo. Johnson posited that, upon Blair’s arrival, “no doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.” A paragraph earlier, he stated that the Queen “has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies.”

Earlier this year, Johnson warned that the European Union is simply finishing the pan-European expansionist dreams once held by Adolf Hitler and Napoleon. He has in the past described U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as a vision with “dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.” And, again just this year, he alleged Barack Obama – and the man who is still currently still President of the primary nation with which the U.K. will want to trade upon its eventual exit from the EU – held a grudge against Britain because of his “part-Kenyan ancestral dislike” of the nation’s colonial history.

In between all that, Boris (and it is his first name by which he is best known) served as a Conservative MP twice, and eight years as the mayor of London. Yesterday, Theresa May, the new prime minister of Britain, named him as her foreign secretary, the nation’s top diplomatic job.

It is an inspired choice. Perfect, even.

It was only a few weeks ago that Boris was still considered the most likely man for an even bigger role, that of prime minister. And nobody, it seemed, considered him more seriously a candidate than Boris himself. His departure from the leadership race was surprising. But we might now know why it happened. An alliance between May and Boris that is, for now, mutually beneficial. Boris gets to add to his bona fides as he, presumably, continues to bide his time to take the top role. As for May? What does she get?

She gets Boris, and all that he stands for. With the winds of change (slight though they may be in some parts of Britain) shifting as they are, that’s not nothing.

The important thing to grasp about Boris is that Britons like him a lot. And consistently. In 2012, he polled as the Britain’s most respected politician. In 2013, he was found to be its most popular. And again in 2014. Ditto 2015. What do they like about him? All of it, probably. His vocabulary. His wit. His bumbling charm. The fact that he rides the tube or a bicycle to and from work. His hair. Even the things he says, apparently despite the words he sometimes chooses to use. And yes, people even like all those photo ops that have so infamously gone awry. When pollster Lord Ashcroft surveyed 8,000 Britons in 2013, 53 per cent agreed that Boris was “different from most politicians, and in a good way.”

Perhaps this is why, at the time, Boris was most popular among self-described voters of the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), the party led by Nigel Farage, whose stance on immigration and trade represents a wholesale rejection of much of Western liberal politics of the last quarter-century. In 2013, a full 64 per cent of them told pollster Michael Ashcroft that Boris would make the best prime minister; only 21 per cent of Conservatives, members of the party to which Boris actually belongs, felt the same. (The latter figure had improved by autumn 2015, according to one count, however, to 29 per cent.)

This likely also explains why three years later, after UKIP’s dogma had fully metastasized into the mainstream of British political culture, Boris emerged as the champion of those very ideas during the campaign for Brexit. The choice he presented was about separation from the EU, yes, but the results he and his followers promised would come after a Leave vote were explicitly goals dreamed up by UKIP followers. Primary among them: fewer immigrants, tighter borders, stricter control over trade, and a nostalgic vision of a jolly, affable colonial Britain that Boris literally still reflects in his writing. In May, a month before the referendum, Farage said that, post-Brexit, Boris was the man he’d most like to see as prime minister.

Boris Johnson leaves 10 Downing Street after being appointed Foreign Secretary, following a Cabinet reshuffle by new Prime Minister Theresa May, in London, Wednesday, July 13, 2016. (Steve Parsons/AP)

Still, this adherence to UKIP dogma cannot fully explain Boris’s appeal. After all, nearly half the voting public sided against his arguments about Europe. And, for much of his public life, Boris has not been actively and loudly campaigning on UKIP-inspired ideas (in fact, he was recently opposed to some of it).

There must be something more to his enduring appeal. We return to that Ashcroft poll and see that another number jumps out: 18 per cent of those surveyed said that Boris is “not really a politician at all.” It is such a small number as to be easily discounted initially, but it might be that this small number of people had it mostly right.

The sum total of Boris – factoring in his outrageous statements, his bumbling public appearances, and his outright campaign lies – is that of a modern-day jester. He is welcomed to the court as the only one given permission to reveal it as the joke many secretly believe it to be. Boris is as much of a politician as anyone else, but he is the best at hiding it. And the most un-politician thing about the Boris that most people see is that he purposefully lends the position of politician no gravitas; instead, he gives the appearance (despite his own lofty upbringing and education) of pulling it down.

Boris is a proof point in an age of rampant cynicism about public office, government, and facts – and what the three can accomplish for people. He is the evidence needed for those convinced that a political structure once revered is in reality a joke. For he is the biggest joke of all, operating successfully at its heart. As Lord Ashcroft described it when his poll was conducted, the idea that Boris might could be prime minister “appeals to those who have the most jaded view of what politics can achieve for the country and themselves.”

We might now add Theresa May, Britain’s new prime minister to that list.

Perhaps it is too simplistic to believe that a nation’s foreign minister ought to be a distillation of his government’s vision of the nation it briefly controls, but assuming that is the case, then Boris is surely the accurate choice to embody and reflect to the world the state of political Britain, dark though that prospect may seem. Boris, Ashcroft surmised, represents “the antithesis of the idea that serious times call for serious people.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/why-boris-johnson-is-the-perfect-pick-to-be-foreign-minister/feed/4The politics of the English summer househttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-politics-of-the-english-summer-house/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-politics-of-the-english-summer-house/#respondSat, 30 Apr 2016 12:14:16 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=865107Adrian Tinniswood documents the history of the English country house in the interwar years

“What is a weekend?” Violet Crawley’s ignorance of the concept in Downton Abbey exemplifies the grand, timeless Edwardian ethos that once enveloped English country house life, real and fictional. The First World War changed everything. One in 10 titled families lost an heir, forcing the sale of inherited estates, both large and small. Those that survived faced an increasingly uncertain future of rising taxes, increasing labour costs and falling farm rents. Many families coped by breaking up estates and selling off assets at a rate never before seen.

As Tinniswood shows in this history of the English country house and its evolution during the years between world wars, the upheaval wrought in this once-rarefied world often mirrored the changes taking place in society as a whole, including the rise of the professional classes, now able to afford rural retreats of their own thanks to a flood of available properties. What could be an ordinary social history is transformed into a delicious read by the ease with which the author melds anecdotes from diaries and memoirs into his narrative.

In the interwar years, servant-laden mansions like that of the fictional Crawleys went from being commonplace among the aristocracy to luxuries that only the very rich and royalty could afford. The merely rich struggled to stay above water with as few servants as they could afford. For the staff that remained, the hours could be long, the requirements odd. An employer told Gordon Grimmett that he’d be called James, “as all second footmen are called James, just as all my first footmen are called William.”

The democratization was not welcomed by all, of course. The horticultural treasure called Sissinghurst Castle Garden has its origins in the English poet and writer Vita Sackville-West’s dissatisfaction with the hoi polloi moving in. When pedestrian “poultry people” bought the farm next door to them in Kent, Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson quietly moved out, buying a nearby ruined castle that had languished on the market. Nicolson, “terrified of socialist legislation,” initially worried their purchase would be a financial sinkhole. It’s now a British landmark, immortalized in Sackville-West’s writings.

Some were even more direct in their distaste of those society deemed unacceptable. The legendary parties thrown by the 7th Earl Beauchamp —whose family and seat of Madresfield Court was the basis of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited—came to an abrupt halt when the earl was outed by his brother-in-law, the immensely rich and immensely homophobic duke of Westminster. Forced into exile, the earl was sent off with a final communiqué: “Dear Bugger-in-law, you got what you deserved. Yours, Westminster.”

Many grand homes proved too unwieldy in an era that demanded plumbing, electricity and heating. By the end of the century, one in six country houses were demolished. Even before the Second World War, aristocrats were opening their houses to paying visitors to bring in a new stream of income. Today, the stately star is Highclere Castle. Such is the demand to see where Downton Abbey was filmed that this summer’s advance tickets are sold out.

Update, May 2: In one of the most incredible sports stories of all-time, Leicester City Football Club has won the Premier League.

A year ago, on March 27, 2015, the mortal remains of England’s most controversial king were buried with full religious and military honours in Leicester Cathedral. The academic battles may still rage–Did he usurp the throne, then kill the famous princes in the Tower? Did he kill his wife?–but finally, after 530 years in an unmarked, too-short grave, King Richard III was finally given the respect due an anointed king. For the small band of Ricardians who spent years on a quixotic journey to find the only missing remains of an English monarch, his discovery in a parking lot near the cathedral, and subsequent burial marked the end of a long struggle. (The inside story of Richard’s reburial, and its Canadian connection is here.)

For Leicester, it was the start of a renaissance. Not only are tourists pouring into the city, but Leicester’s football (soccer for North Americans) club is “doing rather well,” says the Very Rev. David Monteith, dean of Leicester Cathedral. It’s the epitome of English understatement. Leicester City leads the Premier League. There are more than a few people who believe the medieval king’s burial has something to do with the city’s sports success. Last year, Leicester City was threatened with relegation to a lower tier. Then came the burial in March 2015. Since then Leicester has been on the most improbable winning streak, dominating English football.

“People are immensely proud of Leicester, and now they have a reason to go out and shout about it,” says Sarah Harrison, Leicester’s city centre director. Before, people were apologetic about the economically struggling, ex-industrial city in the East Midlands. Now there’s confidence in what Leicester has accomplished. Richard III and Leicester City have put the city on the map. Monteith agrees. “It’s like Richard himself,” he says. “This business about being the underdog, a provincial English city that people often drove past. That sense of, ‘Come on, there’s a lot more than meets the eye.’ And we’ve not been terribly good at saying that. And championing that.”

Photo by Patricia Treble

None of that would have been possible without the discovery and reburial of the last English king slain in battle. “The king in the carpark who is now the king in the cathedral,”says Monteith. The cluster of Ricardian attractions has created “a honeypot,” Monteith says. It isn’t just the cathedral, but also the Richard III exhibition centre across the street, housed in a historic old school beside that famous parking lot. With Leicester only an hour-long train ride from London, and the compact, historic city core an easy walk from the train station, tourists are arriving in droves, both local and international. In the year since Richard’s burial, more than 230,000 visitors have traipsed inside the small cathedral to visit his burial spot. Before he was discovered, that number was around 30,000. “What has been particularly satisfying is a fair number of people from Yorkshire [where Richard was based] saying, ‘Well, we did think he should be buried in York, but actually he is buried here now and you did it well. We can see it now for ourselves,’ ” Monteith says.

The top three items in the cathedral’s gift shop are the Richard III service orders, books of Richard’s reinterment service and, of course, DVDs of the king’s reinterment. After Easter, two new stained-glass windows are to be installed in the cathedral. Created by Thomas Denny, they will shine down on Richard’s tomb, and feature vignettes from his story as “a way of thinking about the universal human condition.” They are the first such windows installed in nearly a century. “It’s all part of this renaissance in the city in general,” he says. It’s all Richard, all the time. At least for now.

“Richard III may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but he did wonders for the city,” Harrison says. She’s got the statistics. In the last year, visitors to the “Richard economy” have pumped more than $40 million into the economy. There’s another $70 million for products purchased by businesses like hotels and restaurants. The area around the cathedral had lots of empty shops. Now it’s completely full. Whereas tourists used to spend a night in a Leicester hotel, now they are staying two or three nights, and occupancy tops 80 per cent. There’s also been an increase in events and conferences.

Yet even now, “we have get our heads out of 15th century and into a few other centuries that have also been significant,” Monteith recognizes. “Richard’s presence brings many more people to us. I see that being integral to the future sustainability of the cathedral,” the dean says. “I would hope that not only thinking of that in terms of economic sustainability, but that’s vital—there are new jobs at Leicester Cathedral that weren’t there before—but also in terms of cultural sustainability. We want to use this connection with history as a stimulus for new artistic response and exhibitions.” Not only does Leicester have a 2,000-year history, with impressive remnants from virtually every era, but the city also has a vibrant multicultural reputation. The city’s Diwali festival, already a massive event, saw a 40 per cent increase in attendance this year. It’s so big that Harrison is thinking of broadening its reach into the city centre.

And then there’s the football club. While Monteith won’t say whether Richard III has anything to do with the football club’s success, he does point out that the players wear shirts emblazoned with the words “King Power,” though it refers to the owner’s business rather than a certain king. The cathedral uses prayers left behind by visitors in its services. Last week, Monteith read one out: “Pray that Leicester City wins the Premier League” Then he told his congregation, “And all the people must say, ‘Amen.’ And all the congregation loudly said, ‘Amen.’ ”

HIGHER ED

Tessa McWatt

Situated within a select group of metropolitan-England-today novels that range in outlook from despairing to hopeful (Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English, Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani, Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way, Zadie Smith’s NW, and Jackie Kay’s Trumpet), Higher Ed stands in the sensible middle. As though motivated by E.M. Forster’s dictum to “only connect,” the five key characters of McWatt’s magnetic sixth novel are muddling through. Between an employment landscape that’s unsteady and eroding, and relationships that are ruinous or hobbled by circumstances, they’re nevertheless taking small, cautious steps forward and seeking out both a meaningful existence and people to share it with.

A self-critical, middle-aged American who has fled a long-term but dead-end romance, Francine is an administrator at a belt-tightening university, where fretful Robin lectures about film. Francine’s junior, the prof is oblivious to her warmth. He’s also anxious about departmental cuts and a pregnant ex-girlfriend, while being newly attracted to Katrin, a Polish server struggling with café work and puzzling English social norms. Robin’s student, Olivia, and Ed, the Guyanese-born man Olivia believes is her estranged father, complete the multicultural cast.

Across a series of chapters devoted to these questing figures’ histories and experiences (the language of each section cleverly reflecting that character’s particular idioms, from TV earworms and generational slang to literary theory), McWatt conjures a familiar world of uncertainties, in which fallible but striving individuals find basic needs—security, community, bonds—difficult to attain. Kind to her characters, but never blind to their iffy choices or restrictive circumstances, McWatt gradually grants the members of this loosely interrelated tribe some respite. Her generous vision suggests that people might not get exactly what they desire, but, since the world’s a huge, complicated place, it may provide them with something else, something ultimately beneficial.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/a-smart-new-metropolitan-england-today-novel-book-review/feed/0Wither Westminster: How do you fix a crumbling parliament?http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/wither-westminster-how-do-you-fix-a-crumbling-parliament/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/wither-westminster-how-do-you-fix-a-crumbling-parliament/#commentsFri, 13 Mar 2015 13:22:52 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=691483Britain’s parliament building is a mess, and many politicians there wouldn’t have it any other way

London Bridge isn’t falling down, but the Palace of Westminster is another story. Last week in Britain, Speaker of the House John Bercow said in a speech to the Hansard Society that without a massive renovation, the neo-Gothic riverside pile will become uninhabitable within the next two decades. Or, as he rather more grandly put it, “It would be a huge pity if we decided that by the time we had reached the 200th anniversary of the vast fire which consumed the old Parliament and brought this one into being, we had to abandon this site and look elsewhere . . . Yet I will tell you in all candour that unless management of the very highest quality and a not inconsequential sum of public money are deployed on this estate over the next 10 years, that will be the outcome.”

It was not the need for restoration that surprised anyone, but the absolutely shocking price tag, which Bercow estimated to be somewhere around $5.7 billion. This announcement set off a debate in the British papers about what to do with Westminster, which has been a meeting place for the British Houses of Parliament (which today include the House of Commons and the House of Lords) since the 13th century.

According to a 2012 study by the Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal Group, the building is in dire need of refurbishment, a fact made evident by its crumbling stone facade and asbestos-stuffed walls. Situated on the Middlesex bank of the River Thames, it is also prone to flooding and leaks.

But all of this is now part of the building’s history and character—and, in some ways, a point of pride for many British politicians, a group that have an almost unnatural fondness for crumbling institutions and faded grandeur. In the recent BBC TV documentary Inside the Commons, Prime Minister David Cameron described Westminster affectionately as looking “half like a museum, half like a church and half like a school.” (An observation that only applies, if you happen to be a former classmate of Harry Potter or an old Etonian like Cameron.)

Anecdotes of decay have become part of the mythology of place. Last week in the Daily Telegraph, Tory MP Michael Fabricant reminisced about a meeting he’d hosted between MPs, members of the House of Lords, and members of the U.S. military. When screams broke out from the back of the room, he wrote, “I feared a jihadist attack. The admiral stopped speaking, and an embassy security man gave curt instructions into his wrist . . . and then all was revealed. Three little mice were scurrying around, enjoying the crumbs of our nibbles.”

Like most Britons, Fabricant would like to see Westminster properly restored. But this will be no easy task. It will almost certainly require both Houses to relocate for a few years during the renovation. The question of where has kicked off a heated debate of its own. Fabricant suggested Lichfield, a small city in Staffordshire, which “was once the ecclesiastical capital of Mercia,” and also happens to be smack in the centre of the country—and in his own constituency. Others have suggested that the decaying building should be turned into a museum, and another city should become the U.K. capital, vaulting the country into a brave new age of North American-style devolution. Writing for the Independent, columnist Matthew Norman suggested building a brand-new parliament somewhere in the rural and rainy northeast. The idea, he suggested, was to follow the North American model of choosing a capital with a climate and landscape “inhospitable enough to force representatives to spend as little time there as possible, and as much in their home states among the people who elected them.”

Cheeky as the debate might seem, there are serious impracticalities to staying in Westminster beyond the leaky roof. The Commons is so cramped, it can only seat 427 of Britain’s 650 sitting MPs. At the weekly prime minister’s questions, many MPs end up shouting at each other while standing at either end of the gallery. In 1941, the chamber was destroyed during the Blitz, and some argued it should be reconfigured to give MPs more breathing space. The debate raged on, but in the end, prime minister Winston Churchill put an end to it by arguing that the Victorian chamber be replicated to preserve the “intimacy and theatre,” as well as a link to history.

Bercow, in his speech, said he agreed with Churchill. “This is a fabulous institution located in awesome surroundings,” he concluded. “It will require bold and imaginative managerial leadership to ensure that we are a parliament fit for purpose, and that this Victorian legacy can be rendered practical for contemporary representation.” Which is a fancy way of saying it’s time for a makeover; let’s hope we can afford it.

Recently in Britain, a baffling bit of political theatre occurred that set the stage for the coming election year. It all began in Rochester, a mid-sized town in southeast England, where Mark Reckless, the sitting Conservative candidate, left his party for the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), Britain’s far-right, anti-immigration and anti-European Union party. His defection triggered a historic by-election in late November that the Tories fought hard to win. But the previously safe Tory seat was lost as Reckless took 42 per cent of the vote.

Enter Labour MP Emily Thornberry, one of the party’s rising stars. Walking around Rochester after unsuccessfully stumping for her party, Thornberry tweeted a photo with the caption “Image from #Rochester,” which featured a modest brick row house draped with three large flags bearing the St. George’s Cross (the national symbol of England) with a white van parked in front.

A couple of hours later, Thornberry tweeted again to say she was sorry for any offence caused by the image, adding, “People should fly the England flag with pride!” By the afternoon, however, Prime Minister David Cameron condemned Thornberry’s tweet as “completely appalling.” UKIP Leader Nigel Farage agreed, saying Thornberry had “looked down her nose” at the owner of the white van. Even sources close to Labour Leader Ed Miliband said he was extremely angry at the tweet. By evening, Thornberry had resigned her post in the shadow cabinet.

Feel like you’re missing something? It is understandably confusing for a non-British onlooker why such a seemingly innocuous tweet could be so denounced. But, as with anything to do with the thorny subject of class in Britain, it’s all a matter of context and subtle social cues. Properly understood, the debacle reveals the central issue at stake for the 2015 election—specifically, immigration.

In Britain, both the St. George’s flag and white vans are powerful cultural symbols of a certain sort of football-loving, blue-collar, white British Everyman that the Labour Party is painfully conscious of having alienated. (A “white van man” is a cultural stereotype of a boorish, macho tradesman.) Thornberry, as an MP for the tony London district of Islington, is seen to represent that side of the Labour party that has (according to critics) abandoned its working-class roots.

The Tories pounced on her tweet because it offered a convenient counter-narrative to their own humiliating loss in Rochester, but also because it reopened a wound in the flank of the opposition they are hoping will not heal any time soon. This wound is the perception that Labour, since Tony Blair (a member of the Islington professional class himself), has fallen out of touch with “regular folk.” And it was under “New Labour” that Britain adopted an open immigration policy that saw hundreds of thousands of migrants (many of them highly skilled) flood into the country during the 2000s.

UKIP Leader Nigel Farage. (Getty Images)

Many Britons are now angry at the level of immigration that occurred during the Blair-Gordon Brown years and that continues because of the U.K.’s membership in the EU. Just last week, it emerged that, despite all his promises of an “immigration cap,” net migration under Cameron has increased by 43 per cent since the previous year. UKIP’s Farage is the single party leader promising to take Britain out of the EU—the only move that could effectively give Britain control over its borders.

It is, for better or worse, what many regular Britons want, which is why UKIP is waging such an effective battle against the Tories and Labour heading into 2015. While Farage’s party is not expected to sweep the country, the couple of dozen seats where it does have a fair shot could effectively prevent either major party from getting a majority. Farage recently said he expects more Tory and Labour MPs will defect to UKIP. If he’s right, its effect on Britain’s political landscape in 2015 will be significant.

As for the “white van man” at the centre of the controversy, his name is Dan Ware, a 37-year-old, heavily tattooed, cage-fighting car dealer and father of four. His politics, aired widely in the tabloid press after Thornberry’s resignation, display an even deeper problem in British politics: voter apathy. Ware told the Sun he couldn’t remember the last time he’d voted, and said of Thornberry, “I’ve not got a clue who she is, but she’s a snob.”

When Queen Victoria died on Jan. 22, 1901, nearly one-quarter of the world’s population owed its allegiance to the diminutive 81-year-old widow. Though once portrayed as a romantic figure, by the end of her 63-year reign, she had an image as a stiff, humourless imperial figurehead that was being chiselled into biographical stone. Now new research and analysis is reimagining Britain’s longest-reigning monarch. “I think we’ve got a Victoria who is much more recognizable as a real human being than ever before,” says historian A.N. Wilson, whose Victoria is the first comprehensive biography since Elizabeth Longford’s magisterial treatise in 1964.

Like many royal historians, Longford relied heavily on huge volumes of Victoria’s correspondence published after her death. Earlier this year, in Censoring Queen Victoria, Australian historian Yvonne Ward revealed the extent to which the volumes’ first editors, Viscount Esher and Arthur Benson, picked letters to create an enduring stereotype of an innocent girl who “flowered as a constitutional monarch, under the fortunate tutelage of gifted gentlemen,” including her prime ministers and husband, Prince Albert. “They gave us the Queen Victoria they wanted, who wasn’t really a woman at all,” Wilson says.

“She’d given birth rather mysteriously to nine children,” he explains, but according to the editors’ work, “she didn’t have any feelings, any interest in health and in the physical side of life.” Virtually all of her correspondence with women never made it into the volumes; Benson found their intimate contents, including pregnancy, parenting and personal health, “very tiresome.”

That leaves a lot for modern biographers to uncover. Victoria wrote an estimated 60 million words during her reign, with many letters still held in the archives of the recipients, including those women. For instance, in Cobourg, Germany, Wilson scoured through five decades worth of family gossip in twice-weekly letters to Victoria’s sister-in-law, Alexandrine. The Royal Archives at Windsor Castle are extremely cautious about revealing anything controversial about the royal family. So he delved first into outside archives. No “dark secrets emerge from all this research,” he says.

But it is a dramatically different Victoria he presents. For one, she was a “highly engaged, extremely intelligent politician” who devoted considerable time to affairs on the continent. After digging through archives in Germany—Victoria was close to her huge extended family there—Wilson shows how the new widow fought for Germany to become a liberal, parliamentary federation, rather than a nation dominated by the militarism of Bismarck’s Prussia. “She was doing everything humanly possible to prevent the European realpolitik,” he recounts.

Even her marriage is under examination. While she placed Albert on a pedestal after his death in 1861, their relationship was fraught. He “bullied her, emotionally controlled her and was a control freak,” Wilson says. Her famously obsessive grieving is detailed in A Magnificent Obsession, in which Helen Rappaport notes that Victoria was fixated on the outward trappings of mourning even before the prince consort’s death; that year there were seven declarations of official court mourning. Though Victoria was certainly in a “huddle of grief” after his death, she soon began “flapping her wings and becoming free,” having a “whale of a time” with servants John Brown and Abdul Karim, Wilson explains. Rumours of affairs flourished; while her family, courtiers and politicians were horrified, she didn’t care.

“She could be vile,” he says. “She didn’t control her emotions or temper.” She also chafed at the social constraints of those times, particularly on women. When her eldest daughter, another Victoria, wrote that she was pregnant, her mother responded that it was “horrid news” since expectant women were no more than cows or dogs.

A definitive account of Victoria may not be possible: her daughter Beatrice severely censored and rewrote her late mother’s journals, burning the originals as she went. In the end, Wilson’s take on the monarch is simple: “Not likeable but lovable.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/she-was-queen-of-britain-but-also-a-woman/feed/0Britain’s wilful blindness to the horrors in Rotherhamhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/britains-wilful-blindness/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/britains-wilful-blindness/#respondThu, 18 Sep 2014 16:52:48 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=609887What led officials to ignore Rotherham, the nation’s most shocking sex abuse scandal for more than a decade?

Of all the sex-abuse scandals that have plagued Britain in recent years (and there have been sadly too many to count), there hasn’t been one that compares to Rotherham. In this poor, post-industrial South Yorkshire town (pop. 270,000), rings of adult men, mostly from Pakistan, are believed to have trafficked and systematically abused more than 1,400 girls over a period of 16 years. Most of the victims were white, working-class, underage girls who lived in the community with their parents.

The terrible extent of this culture of exploitation—and the wilful institutional blindness that allowed it to thrive—was outlined in an extensive report published two weeks ago. The report, which is only the beginning of the renewed investigation into what went so wrong in Rotherham, after a two-year-long independent inquiry into child sexual exploitation, led by professor Alexis Jay, an authority on child welfare. The inquiry was commissioned as the result a lengthy investigation by the Times of London into allegations that the abuse scandal had been much more widespread than was previously understood. In 2010, five Pakistani-British men were convicted of abusing girls as young as 12 in Rotherham—a result that now looks to be barely scratching the surface of justice.

Reading the report, it is difficult to conceive of how such organized abuse could go on in contemporary Britain. The descriptions read like war crimes: Victims were “raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated.” There were examples of children who had been soaked with gas and threatened with fire as well as menaced with guns. Tragically, though perhaps not surprisingly, many of the victims were already vulnerable to begin with. A third of them were already known to local child-protection services because of family neglect.

The most pressing question—how was this allowed to happen?—is finally becoming clear. An institutional culture of political correctness seems to have prevented authorities in government, social services and the police force from properly investigating complaints about groups of brown men abusing white girls. Local councillors who got wind of the abuse have admitted to sweeping it aside for fear of upsetting the powerful Pakistani Muslim voter base. Police simply refused to believe the parents and victims who came to them begging for help, and in many cases treated both the children and their complaints with utter disdain.

Earlier this month, Home Secretary Theresa May put the failure of justice down to “cultural concerns—both the fear of being seen as racist, and the frankly disdainful attitude to some of our most vulnerable children.” She added that such concerns “must never stand in the way of child protection.” Last week, May announced that Louise Casey, head of the government’s Troubled Families program, would conduct a separate investigation into the failure of child services in Rotherham and how it could be prevented from happening again. That investigation will be conducted alongside a separate probe by the South Yorkshire police into their own failures.

There has been some fallout, though it all seems fairly minor in contrast to the alleged crimes. Four Labour councillors were suspended by party leader Ed Miliband. In spite of this, Shaun Wright, the police commissioner for South Yorkshire, who was previously in charge of children’s services for Rotherham, refused to step down until Sept. 16. When he arrived last week at a meeting of the force’s police and crime panel he was booed by a crowd. The grandfather of a victim shouted, “If I had a gun, I’d shoot you.”

Victims and their advocates are deeply angered by a recent BBC report that there may have been an illegal cover-up. An unnamed Home Office researcher said after she had investigated alleged sex-grooming complaints in 2002, her office had been raided and her Rotherham files stolen. Martin Kimber, the local authority’s scandal-plagued outgoing chief executive, admitted to the parliamentary committee that while he knew of three separate reports that had been written up in 2002, 2003 and 2006, he had not been able to find them in the council’s archive despite a lengthy search.

Despite all this—or indeed perhaps because of it—no new charges have been laid. Jason Harwin, the district commander for Rotherham, apologized publicly to the overlooked victims, promising that his staff would “relentlessly go wherever the evidence takes them and do everything they can with partners to identify offenders and bring them to justice.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/britains-wilful-blindness/feed/0Scotland’s referendum is a bold, Braveheart campaignhttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/scotlands-referendum-is-a-bold-braveheart-campaign/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/scotlands-referendum-is-a-bold-braveheart-campaign/#commentsMon, 11 Aug 2014 10:58:29 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=590693Both loved and loathed, the 1995 film classic looms large in the battle over Scottish independence

In late June, a bunch of aging Scottish actors gathered in Edinburgh for a screening of Mel Gibson’s 1995 epic Braveheart. The occasion was the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, depicted in the film, in which, after a series of humbling defeats, a contingent of scrappy Scottish warriors routed King Edward II’s army of English invaders. That the screening came during the campaign for Scotland’s Sept. 18 referendum—in which voters will decide whether to break from England and declare independence—escaped no one’s notice, including the cast members.

Stars Peter Mullan, Angus Macfadyen and Brian Cox all turned up at the Dominion cinema with wee blue ‘Yes’ pins on their lapels, indicating their support for Scottish independence. “Braveheart was just a movie, but this referendum is the real deal,” said Cox, who played Argyle Wallace, uncle of the warrior hero William Wallace (played by Gibson).

“I’m for ‘Yes,’ ” echoed Macfadyen, who played the Scots king, Robert the Bruce. (Gibson, in various interviews, has expressed pleasant surprise that this film has resonance so long after it was made, but hasn’t directly commented on the referendum.)

Related from Maclean’s:

The shadow of Braveheart hangs over the referendum campaign. Supporters of “Better Together” (the pro-union side, alternatively titled “No Thanks”) have accused independence supporters of harping on about long-ago history, in an effort to stoke Scottish nationalism. In turn, ‘Yes Scotland’ champions have worked to distance themselves from tribalism, England-bashing and appeals to historic enmity. They are not interested in discussing Braveheart (described by the Times as one of “the 10 most historically inaccurate movies” of all time). “Every time a journalist brings up Braveheart—the minute they bring it up—I know they have no idea what’s going on,” says Scottish National Party (SNP) MP Angus Robertson. “You don’t win votes about the next 700 years by talking about the last 700 years.”

Things were different when Braveheart first premiered in Scotland: The marginal SNP was angling for support and the film was a welcome hit. SNP activists distributed Gibson-inspired political leaflets outside cinemas. In a major conference speech that year, party leader Alex Salmond declared himself “with Wallace, head and heart”—and borrowed the brawny hero’s famed “Freedom, freedom, freedom” cry. Back then, “the SNP was seen as the so-called tartan fringe of Scottish politics,” acknowledges Graeme Sneddon, a Glasgow-based Yes campaigner. Today, he argues, that legacy leads some unionists to unfairly dismiss Yes Scotland as “all Braveheart and bagpipes.”

Today, allusions to William Wallace are likely to come from the No side. In July, Scottish Labour MP Douglas Alexander, who represents the constituency where Wallace was born, insisted that his constituents have “brave hearts but wise heads”—and so, will vote No in September. In 2013, after several polls suggested that men are more likely than women to back independence, Scottish employment minister Jo Swinson (a No supporter) spoke of “a Braveheart tendency,” whereby men back independence because of their “macho view toward Scotland the brave.”

It is clear, too, that Yes leaders are embarrassed by the SNP’s earlier trumpeting of medieval battle history. They are quick to tout their affection for Merry England—and their hope for a relationship with London post-independence. Even the November 2013 launch of Scotland’s “white paper” on independence was, in the words of Scottish writer Alex Massie, marked by a “lack of drama—the merciful absence of bagpipes-and-Braveheart-bulls–t.” More than anything, the Bannockburn commemoration—which included a choreographed battle re-enactment—put the SNP in a pickle; the event was too important for leader Salmond not to attend, but his presence was subdued.

“The film has influenced politics,” agrees Scottish actress Mhairi Calvey, who played young Murron MacClannough in the movie. Speaking in London, she discusses the defining role that Braveheart has played in her life, from her casting at age six to her ongoing role as a Braveheart representative at Scottish cultural events. As for her politics? In a barely Scottish lilt, she will only say that “Scottish people are passionate [and] will choose to do what’s right in the long run.”

In the meantime, one unlikely person has been left untouched by this Braveheart-tinged wrangling: Queen Elizabeth II. Although the film features Scots rising up against the Crown, Yes supporters have not embraced the theme; they say an independent Scotland will retain the Queen as head of state. Even Salmond—who once eagerly channelled William Wallace—now expresses his “undiminished” affection for “Elizabeth, Queen of Scots.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/scotlands-referendum-is-a-bold-braveheart-campaign/feed/2House of cadshttp://www.macleans.ca/news/house-of-cads/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/house-of-cads/#commentsThu, 06 Feb 2014 14:11:11 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=505103A growing scandal has put the spotlight on sexism in the backroom boys’ club of British politics

The most British sex scandal of all time— involving an indignant lord, several outraged women, a bumbling politician and no actual sex—exploded last week, as Liberal Democrat party Leader Nick Clegg suspended Chris Rennard, the party whip and life peer in the House of Lords, for refusing to apologize for allegedly sexually harassing several female colleagues. “Alleged,” because, although rumours of Rennard’s wandering hands have swirled in British political circles for over a decade now, an internal party inquiry concluded earlier this month that, while there was broadly credible evidence of behaviour that “violated the personal space and autonomy of the complainants,” it was also “unlikely that it could be established beyond reasonable doubt that Lord Rennard had intended to act in an indecent or sexually inappropriate way.” In other words, he is kinda sorta guilty, only not really.

Four women within the Lib Dem party have come forward in recent weeks with complaints. Their allegations, which go back as early as 2003, involve a lot of inappropriate brushing and accidental-on-purpose knee-patting. Suzanne Gaszczak, a former Bedfordshire councillor, said in 2007 that Rennard touched the outside of her leg and, when she moved away, persisted in brushing parts of her she “didn’t want to be brushed.” Bridget Harris, a former special adviser to Nick Clegg, claims that, in 2003, Rennard squeezed her knee over dinner and suggested perhaps they should take their coffee in his room. She refused, and that was that. Except, of course, it most definitely wasn’t. Harris later resigned over the party’s refusal to take action.

Part of the problem has been Nick Clegg’s rather wishy-washy handling of the affair. When allegations first emerged last February, Clegg initially said he knew nothing about them. He changed course and admitted he had been made aware of certain “indirect and non-specific concerns” about Rennard’s behaviour back in 2008, but, as the lord denied them, his hands had been tied. Since then, however, Clegg has repeatedly demanded Rennard apologize to the women in question—going so far as to suspend him from the party for failing to do so. Clegg’s wife, Miriam, a Spanish-born lawyer, is reported to be personally livid with Rennard, once a close family friend and powerful party strategist.

Rennard vehemently denies the allegations and insists he will not apologize, since doing so would leave him vulnerable to action in civil court. News reports this week confirmed that he was preparing to sue the party over his suspension. Sources close to the lord warned that, if he commenced legal action, the Lib Dems would be subjected to a “bloodbath” precisely at the moment the party ought to be girding for the election next year. Lord Carlile, Rennard’s legal adviser, told the media that Rennard’s lawyers were in possession of damaging personal information that could discredit at least one of his accusers. The complainants have responded with accusations of “veiled threats” and smear campaigns.

In a 2,600-word memo released the day he was supposed to resume his seat in the House of Lords last week, Rennard complained of a conspiracy against him, and said he had succumbed to a state of deep depression in which he had even contemplated self-harm. “If ever I have hurt, embarrassed or upset anyone, then it would never have been my intention and, of course, I regret that they may have felt any hurt, embarrassment or upset. But, for the reasons given, I will not offer an apology to the four women complainants. I do not believe that people should be forced to say what they know they should not say, or do not mean.”

Apart from delighting political opponents, the Rennard affair has thrown a spotlight on the issue of sexual misconduct in the backroom boys’ club of British politics. Many insist the row is an important battle in the war against sexism in British politics. Women still account for only 22 per cent of MPs in the British Parliament, and the Rennard affair, for many feminists, is a pernicious symptom of this imbalance. Sexual harassment is about power, not sex, theGuardian’s Polly Toynbee reminds us. “Touching up women at work is a way to exert power, often an act of aggression to keep them in their place: Underneath it all, a women’s realm is the bedroom.”

Nick Clegg has continued doing what he does best, which is waffle. Speaking on his radio show last week, the party leader indicated for the first time that he might be willing to accept a qualified apology from Rennard, on the off chance the peer “inadvertently” caused offence to the women involved. Civil court action might threaten to tear his party apart, but for Clegg to accept a disingenuous apology at this point seems worse than ludicrous. Either Lord Rennard is kinda-sorta guilty of accidentally-on-purpose brushing up against women, or he’s simply not.

]]>The Scene. Libby Davies rose to list a series of complaints about the Harper government’s general and to take note of a new proposal for child care services. “Now that even the big banks are challenging Conservatives’ priorities, when will the Prime Minister rethink his shortsighted budget choices?” she wondered.

The Prime Minister was obliged here to stand and offer the official assurances. “Mr. Speaker, the policy of this government has been to gradually balance the budget over the medium-term while not raising taxes as the NDP would like us to do and while preserving our payments for vital programs like health care, education and, of course, pensions for our senior citizens,” he reported.

And, in light of yesterday’s news, there was apparently another reason to brag.

“With that approach, Canada has record leading job creation among major developed countries and policies that are highly emulated around the world,” Mr. Harper continued, “one of the reasons I think that somebody like Mr. Carney can be recruited to serve in another country. Canada has a lot to be proud of.”

So apparently Mr. Carney has Mr. Harper to thank, at least in part, for his new job. Perhaps David Cameron might’ve saved himself the expense of hiring a new bank governor and simply renamed his budgets as “economic action plans” and started yelling about how the opposition’s plans to introduce a carbon tax imperil the monarchy. (Oh, the British government has proposed putting a price on carbon? Well, I suppose Mr. Carney’s cause is hopeless then.)

For whatever reason, Ms. Davies thought she saw an opening to turn this around.

“Mr. Speaker, 50,000 more people are unemployed today than before the recession,” she offered. “That is the Conservative record. The global economy is shaky and Canadians need reassurance. Now the Governor of the Bank of Canada has abruptly resigned.”

The Conservatives howled with laughter. Were there not desktops in the way, numerous knees might’ve been slapped.

Ms. Davies was forced by the noise to pause. The Speaker called for order and returned the floor to the New Democrat deputy leader.

“Mr. Speaker, he left in quite a hurry,” Ms. Davies attempted to clarify.

More chuckles were had.

Mr. Harper stood to respond with a smile on his face. “Mr. Speaker, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, who has done a tremendous job and we know will do a tremendous job in a country with much greater difficulties than Canada, has told me he is taking up that job in July of next year,” the Prime Minister offered. “That sort of stretches the definition of abruptly just a little bit.”

The Conservatives laughed once more. The Prime Minister is indeed a stickler for specificity in public discourse.

“The record of this government is that there are 800,000 net new jobs created in this country, more people working now in Canada than before the recession,” Mr. Harper continued. “While there is a ways to go, this is better than the vast majority of developed countries at this time.”

Ms. Davies saw a segue. “Mr. Speaker, the record is that the finance minister and the Prime Minister cannot get their stories straight on whether the budget will be balanced by 2015,” she ventured. “They cannot agree even on whether more service cuts are coming. The finance minister claims he has a plan for another recession, but the Prime Minister cannot tell us what it is. How can Canadians have any confidence in our economy when the Prime Minister does not seem to have confidence in his own finance minister?”

Mr. Harper, rising with a shrug, was happy to convey his admiration for Jim Flaherty.

“Mr. Speaker,” the Prime Minister recalled, “the Minister of Finance has been recognized as probably the best in his job in the entire developed world.”

“His record speaks for itself and besides, of course, agreeing on all of the big issues, one of the things we most strongly agree on is that this country does not need the kind of tax increases advocated by the NDP,” Mr. Harper continued.

“We do not need to raise taxes on employers at a time when we are trying to create jobs.”

The Stats. The environment, six questions. The economy, five questions. The budget and national Defence, four questions each. Health care, fisheries and refugees, three questions each. The F-35, foreign investment and museums, two questions each. Pharmaceuticals, unions, science, search-and-rescue and agriculture, two questions each.

Martin Amis moved from London to New York City last year, and his new novel, Lionel Asbo, has widely been viewed as a parting shot at his native U.K. But Amis himself sees it more as a goodbye hug, even though it’s a satire about a lout who wins a lottery and becomes a ridiculous public figure. Over the phone from a lodge in British Columbia, the author of Money and London Fieldsspoke with Maclean’s about America, England, new beginnings, and what he’d like to leave behind.

Q:Are you on holiday now?

A: Yeah, sort of. My wife [writer Isabel Fonseca] is doing a travel piece, and I just tagged along. It’s all hiking and kayaking and whale-watching, and I’m an indoorsy type. It’s great, ’cause I don’t have to be taking notes or involving myself in anything. I can just get on with my stuff.

Q:You’re now based in Brooklyn, I take it, for family reasons?

A: Just over two years ago, my mother died, and within a week, the prognosis for Christopher Hitchens was available. That got us thinking about mortality and my wife’s mother and stepfather. We thought, “They’re not going to be around forever.” At this point, it looked as though Christopher might well have lived for five or 10 years more, and those two considerations were enough. It was expressing no disaffection for England.

Q:That said, over the years you have mused about moving to the U.S., because Britain is “not exciting.”

A: The truth is, I’ve never been interested in British politics—or interested only to the extent that it relates to American politics. There’s undoubtedly a kind of gravitational attraction exerted by the centre of the world. Things that happen in Washington matter all over the world, and that has long ceased to be the case for London.

Q:You covered the Iowan Republican primary for Newsweek, and you’ve described Mitt Romney as looking “crazed with power.” What do you make of his running mate, Paul Ryan?

A: It seems to me quite an aggressive choice, making no bones about the fact that this is a plutocratic-leaning party, that money has entered politics in the last couple of years much more obtrusively than ever before. It seems that the Republican party’s just burning itself out and I think will lose the election and will then have to go back to the drawing board. Q: The Tea Party continues to splinter the GOP. A: Only a heavy defeat would get rid of them entirely, but I think the social issues that keep bobbing to the surface, like gay marriage and abortion, are losing their grip on the populace at quite a rate.

Q:What did you make of all the brouhaha in the press about your move to Brooklyn?

A: So far I’ve had a very nice welcome. I had a very weird exit from England. In America, there isn’t the suspicion of writers that there is now in Britain, because everyone understood that writers would play a part in defining a new country. Britain would be so very resentful of any attempt to define it, because its culture is so much more deeply embedded.

Q:Does that also explain some of the spleen that’s been directed at the subtitle of your new book: “State of England”?

A: Yeah. That was all a sinister coincidence, really, because I was halfway through the book when we had this fairly sudden decision to move. And it does look like my verdict in leaving was that novel, but that’s erroneous. It was more my affectionate evocation of Britain.

Q:Some reviewers have critiqued Lionel Asbo as being derogatorytowardtheworkingclass; they focus on Lionel, who’s a criminal, rather than his hard-working nephew, Des, the book’s other main character.

A: He’s a celebration of the working class. It was much more of a challenge to create Desmond because of the inherent difficulties of making goodness interesting on the page. Something that Dickens, who was my great god when I was writing this novel, in fact failed to do: his goodies are famously insipid and dull. We don’t read Dickens for Little Nell and Esther Summerson; we read him for Quilp and Carker—all the villains and the wags and the eccentrics. That’s where Dickens’s energy goes. To channel energy into a good character is very difficult, and not very many writers have made goodness, happiness, the positive, work on the page.

Q:Your last novel, The Pregnant Widow, has an epigraph by 19th-century Russian socialist Alexander Herzen. Lionel Asbo’s sections start with variations on the chorus of the Baha Men song Who Let the Dogs Out. How did it work its way into the book?

A: It was the initiating idea. Ideas for novels often come from an overheard conversation, or something you see in a newspaper—Lolita began life that way. I was reading about someone who, as an act of revenge, unleashed his pit bulls on the infant of his enemy; that was the first thought I had when the novel was taking shape in my unconscious. I wanted that kind of chant, that incantation, because the lines are very resonant for me.

Q:When Lionel’s pit bulls are treated well, they become loving, and when they aren’t, they’re violent. Is this a metaphor for the English?

A: Well, a universal metaphor. One other surprising thing about the novel snuck up on me as I was writing—it’s to do with intelligence. Desmond idealistically cultivates his own intelligence and worships it and values it, whereas Lionel hates it; Desmond [observes] that Lionel gives being stupid a lot of very intelligent thought. And I realized that all my life I’ve hung out with people a bit like Lionel and Desmond; even the most law-breaking of them is in fact amazingly vivid and articulate and expressive. I feel that down there, in the underclass, there is a great deal of thwarted, trapped intelligence. It becomes self-destructive, and then out of that comes a sort of delight in stupidity, which nearly always includes a delight in violence. There was an old [Tony Blair-era] Labour slogan that just said, “Education, education, education,” and I found myself very strongly agreeing with that, and feeling that that is in fact the core political question. I see the job description of the novelist [as] playing some sort of role in the education business.

Q:You’ve said recently that the novelist has to love his characters as well as his readers. Is this different from your oft-quoted sentiment that “the author is not free of sadistic impulses”?

A: Ah, [laughs]. Well, I think they don’t completely rule each other out, but it’s become clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. Theodor Adorno’s line, “No poetry after Auschwitz,” is in fact contradicted by Paul Celan, who was writing poetry in a Romanian labour camp.

Q:Is it harder to get across the idea of celebration when writing about the Holocaust, as with the novel you’re working on now?

A: Yes, it is slightly more difficult, but interesting. And [I’m writing about] an absolutely hateful character, but Nabokov, who was always a very good guide in these things, was convinced that the way you dealt with extreme villainy in fiction was not to punish it. Your villain is not to be tritely converted, as Dickens tended to do, but the novelist’s job is bitter mockery, and that’s part of how I’m going at it.

Q:I understand that when Christopher Hitchens passed away, you felt that he left you some of his joie de vivre.

A: Yeah. It was surprising, because the death is a disaster, but what surprises you in the ensuing months is that—and wouldn’t it be nice if it were universally true—it’s as if you have the duty to feel that love of life. His was very strong—stronger than mine, I always felt. Wouldn’t it be nice if they do bequeath you that? It warms you, but it also warms your memory of them.

Q: You called the publication of last year’s biography of you by Richard Bradford, for which you were interviewed, a “regrettable episode.” Do you hope that one day a better book will be written about you?

A: Yeah, eventually. But I haven’t thought about it. It was vanity that got me into that first one, but vanity is, I suppose, part of the job. It would be nice, but it doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is being read after I’m gone. I think every writer thinks about that. It’s nicely complicated, and it keeps you honest, because you won’t be around for that.

Q:Much has been written about you and your father, Kingsley, as two generations of uncommonly successful writers. Your son Louis writes non-fiction, and when she was 10, your daughter Fernanda published fan fiction in The Guardian about Harry Potter. Should we be on the lookout for a third generation of Amises on the literary scene?

A: [laughs] As my first wife said, “Yet another nightmare writer is going to appear on the horizon.” I don’t know. I don’t even speculate about it; I think even if I do, that creates a bit of unwelcome pressure for [my children]. I certainly would never encourage them to write. Not that I don’t think it’s a wonderful way to spend your life.

]]>In Britain, the coalition government’s House of Lords reform bill appears doomed after 91 Conservative MPs defied the party whip to vote against it. The presence of the dissenting Tories also forced David Cameron to withdraw a motion that would have set a limit on debate of the bill.

The coalition is now entering one of its most difficult phases as Tory MPs question the prime minister’s authority. A central tactic by Downing Street – to delay a ministerial reshuffle to persuade aspiring MPs to support the government – backfired as loyalists joined the rebels who numbered close to 100. “There was strength in numbers,” one senior MP said. “But they were brave.”

There’s an endless debate in Canada about whether higher tuition causes fewer students to attend university. Those who fight tuition increases argue that high prices keep poorer students out.

New evidence from England suggests otherwise.

But before that, consider the hypothetical argument. Tina, a high school senior from a low-income family will apply to engineering if it’s going to cost her $2,000 per year, but won’t if it costs her $10,000. Her friend Paul, whose parents are wealthy, can afford to attend either way. So if tuition rises, Paul attends, graduates and gets a high-paying job. Tina goes to work at Zellers instead. The cycle of poverty continues.

It’s a good argument. It was also the ammunition used by those (mosty left-wingers) who fought tuition increases in Quebec by shutting down classes and marching in the streets.

But fiscal conservatives, who are happy for individuals to pay more of the bill, ask: “where’s the proof?” They point out that jurisdictions with higher tuition don’t have less enrollment; they have more. The Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a think tank, reiterated this idea in today’s Province:

There is very little evidence that cut-rate tuition causes significantly more young people to go to university. A simple comparison between Ontario and Quebec illustrates the point. In the past academic year, the average tuition for Quebec’s undergraduates was $2,400. Average tuition in Ontario was $6,640, among the highest in the country. Ontario, however, has significantly higher university participation rates and attainment rates for young adults than does Quebec. The university attainment rate in Quebec for 25 to 34 year olds currently stands at 32 per cent, compared to 37 per cent in “high” tuition Ontario.

That too is a good argument. But how can both sides be right?

Here’s one theory. Perhaps tuition simply hasn’t reached the point in places like Ontario where high school graduates experience so much sticker shock that they don’t bother to enroll. Perhaps $6,640 per year in exchange for a lifetime of higher incomes looks like a a good deal to most of them.

But what if tuition rose higher? What if it rose a lot higher?

We now have an answer. Three years ago, tuition in England was almost nothing. Thanks to austerity, universities may now charge up to $14,200. Many have chosen to set fees there this fall. The result is a 10 per cent drop in applications. Students are clearly sensitive to the price.

But it’s a bit more complicated than the anti-tuition movement suggests. As Marni Soupcoff of the National Post was quick to point out, applications dropped less among students from poor families than those from middle and higher income families. Soupcoff concludes that’s a good thing:

There will be just as many “disadvantaged” students [graduating in the U.K.]. The only thing that has changed is that a greater number of students are self-selecting out of the admissions process because they don’t view a university education as worth the higher price. I cannot see that this is anything but a reasonable—and desirable—market correction.

The Telegraph‘s education editor attributes the middle and upper class students’ higher likelihood to skip out on university to the fact that lower income students get so much financial support.

That is where Canadians should pay attention. The protesters in Quebec say that tuition, which will be $3,800 after seven years of hikes, will prevent the poor from attending. But poor students in England aren’t any more scared off university by high tuition because they have financial support.

Premier Jean Charest’s intention all along was to make those who can afford it—the middle and upper classes—pay a little more money so that its universities can improve quality without piling more burden on taxpayers. The evidence from England suggests it was a fair approach.

Apart from the country’s highest elected office, there may be no British job so heavily scrutinized and culturally significant as that of manager of England’s football team. Britain, like the rest of Europe, is obsessed by football. And while its domestic leagues attract the best international players, making it one of the richest and most powerful sports franchises on earth, its national team has failed to win a major championship since 1966. To say fans here are a tad bummed out about this is like saying Charlie Sheen has a bit of an ego problem. Indeed, when it comes to football, Britain is as much a nation defined by bitter disappointment and nostalgia for past victories as it is by an enduring love for its national game.

This swell of collective emotion is why, when Fabio Capello abruptly quit his position as team manager last week, England responded with a heavily qualified hip-hip-hurrah! Qualified, because the surprise resignation plunges the team even deeper into an ongoing leadership crisis just months before the next European championship in June. Hurrah, however, because Capello had long been criticized by fans and commentators alike on two counts: 1) he failed to take the team further than the second round at the last World Cup, and 2) after four years of earning $9.5 million per annum for coaching just a dozen or so games a year, his command of the English language showed little, if any, improvement.

To his credit, Capello resigned on principle. His dispute with the Football Association, over whether team captain John Terry should be stripped of his arm band pending a trial set for July over allegations of racist remarks, was a matter of professional integrity (though it didn’t make British fans any sorrier to see him go). Earlier this month, Capello gave a candid interview on Italian state television in which he declared he “absolutely” disagreed with his bosses’ decision to strip Terry of his captaincy pending his trial for racial abuse of another player, the Queens Park Rangers’ Anton Ferdinand. “I have spoken to the [FA] chairman and I have said that in my opinion one cannot be punished until it is official and the court—a non-sport court, a civil court—had made a decision to decide if John Terry has done what he is accused of.”

There was, apparently, no turning back. A statement announcing Capello’s departure was issued shortly after his hour-long meeting with FA heads David Bernstein and Alex Horne at Wembley Stadium in London last Wednesday. Just before hopping on a flight back to Italy, Capello released a brief statement, saying, “I would like to thank all players, staff and Football Association for the professionalism they have shown during my years as manager of the English national team.”

Dramatically, the break occurred on the very same day Tottenham Hotspur coach Harry Redknapp was cleared of charges of tax evasion in a high-profile criminal court case of his own. The popular coach is widely considered to be the most likely successor for Capello’s job—a likelihood bolstered by his successful track record as a player and a manager, as well as his public image. Redknapp is an East London cockney with the flushed complexion of a man who enjoys a pint with the lads. Asked about his feelings on taking over the national team, Redknapp was dismissive. “I don’t know anything about the England job, I’ve not thought about it. I’ve got a job to do, I’ve got a big game on Saturday with Tottenham. Tottenham is my focus,” he told reporters gathered outside his home in Dorset.

If Redknapp does take the job, he might well do so with some trepidation. The intense press scrutiny endured by the England manager famously led sportswriters to dub the role “the impossible job.” No manager has passed the semifinals since Alf Ramsey led his “wingless wonders” to glory against West Germany in 1966. Since then, a string of managers has endured public scorn and the wrath of the British media in failing to deliver the desired result.

Swedish manager Sven-Goran Eriksson, the first non-British appointment, came closest, despite being hired amid nationalist controversy in 2001. After guiding the team to three successive quarter-finals in major championships, in 2006 Eriksson was duped into telling an undercover reporter, Mazher Mahmood (the now-defunct News of the World’s notorious “fake sheik”), that he would be willing to leave his position to manage Aston Villa. Despite public outcry over the dirty sting operation, Eriksson departed his post later that year and was succeeded by his assistant, Steve McClaren.

As the FA mulls over whom to appoint next, the Olympic and under-21 coach Stuart Pearce will take the helm. The bosses say they’re running a full and thorough search for a successor, but this time around, smart money’s on a homegrown candidate. “He will not definitely be English, but clearly there is a preference for an Englishman or a British person,” Bernstein told the press. “In the end we want the best person so I’m certainly not prepared to rule out anything at this stage.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/a-red-card-for-the-national-teams-coach/feed/0‘Free to believe. Free to love. Free to be.’http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/free-to-believe-free-to-love-free-to-be/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/free-to-believe-free-to-love-free-to-be/#commentsMon, 23 Jan 2012 20:18:19 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=235243The prepared text of John Baird’s speech to an audience in London, England today.Good evening, I am pleased to be with you tonight and it’s a real pleasure to …

]]>The prepared text of John Baird’s speech to an audience in London, England today.

Good evening, I am pleased to be with you tonight and it’s a real pleasure to be back in London – one of the world’s truly great cities and one of my personal favourites. I would like to begin by thanking Canada’s High Commissioner here in London – Gordon Campbell – and his team, for making this visit possible.

One of the reasons I – like so many Canadians who come here to vacation, study or work – so enjoy being here is because, in a very real sense, it feels like coming to a familiar and welcoming place. That sense of the familiar is all the more welcome, given that so much of the world is undergoing a fundamental transformation.

Power is rebalancing and, with it, opportunities are changing, for Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as for our allies and friends. This presents for Canada and Canadians both challenge and opportunity: to shape the relationships and institutions for a new century; to promote free societies and open markets; and to engage with new and sometimes, unfamiliar power brokers.

I believe the Canada and the United Kingdom have a common cause in this period of transformation, just as we did at the end of the Second World War and throughout the Cold War. Throughout that period, we helped to create and sustain the institutions that secured the prosperity and freedoms for a generation. The end of the Cold War liberated millions in Europe and elsewhere. Now we see the demands of others, others who are pleading to the world for those same freedoms.

The support for free markets and open societies will be the defining struggle of the coming decades – the United Kingdom and Canada have been partners in this great endeavour before; we are partners now, and we will be partners in the future in our common cause. While we are confronting change, Canada and the United Kingdom share fundamental values that are constant, that are beacons of light to people everywhere: freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. We have fought side by side in two world wars to uphold those values, and we are ever committed to advance them today.

With that proud legacy of partnership as an essential background, I stand in front of you today, to outline a portion of Canada’s foreign policy.

One that is a priority to me as Foreign Minister, one that is a priority for our Prime Minister and one that is a priority for all Canadians, from every corner of our country. That is, promoting and protecting the fundamental rights and liberties of people around the world. It is something we often take for granted in our pluralistic societies, something we often overlook. But the vivid images of suffering and repression beam through our television sets, and are plastered in our newspapers.

We’ve reached a point in our history where the rights of our fellow citizens can no longer be ignored. The world we live in today is very much interconnected, and the diversity we see in Canada and United Kingdom are a testament to that. What we have realized through our long histories, is that for a nation to be prosperous, it must be free, and free for all people, to realize their full potential, to realize their dreams and aspirations.

Liberties must be respected. Basic rights must be shared equally. For men and women, to realize their full potential, they must be free. This is our priority; this is the world’s challenge and opportunity.

Now, I believe our two countries share so much that is fundamental. Our bonds are many; Our ties are deep; Our values are shared, … And, you know our heads of state look remarkably similar. Your Queen and our Queen are the same Queen. And we rejoice in her diamond jubilee this year, because she is and has been profoundly important to Canadian history, Canadian values and kind of society we have built.

I cannot overstate the unifying role of the Queen and all she represents in bringing our two peoples together – across oceans – and across generations. She is much more than a head of state. She embodies the best qualities of our peoples. She is a shining example to the world.

We in Canada, and in Britain, know well the Queen’s leadership and both our countries benefit from the full participation of women in all aspects of society. I think of leaders like Baroness Thatcher. Canadian Chief Justice of the Supreme Court . And countless others. These women have contributed and continue to contribute to our countries, and our way of life. They are shining examples of love of country. Their commitment to public service is real and deep, as is their determination in striving for what is good and just.

The strong role of women at the heart our democracies helps make our societies not only more inclusive, but also more peaceful and prosperous; of this, I am convinced. As Foreign Minister, I have made it a priority to advocate for the participation of women at all levels of society – especially as regimes fall and new states emerge in various corners of the world. I am particularly proud of the role Canada has played – in concert with our NATO allies and Afghan civil society – in advancing women’s rights in Afghanistan.

In 2001, young Afghan girls did not attend school. They were barred from doing so. Even today, young girls who try to get an education do so at the risk of being injured, killed, or of having acid thrown in their faces. In 2011, 10 years after the fall of the oppressive Taliban regime, 2.2 million Afghan girls attend school, and 30 percent of their educators are women. What a stark difference. Afghan women now also participate actively in political life and civil society. Although much remains to be done for the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan, this is a clear indicator of the progress made over the years.

The young Afghan girls that go to school today in Kandahar and Kabul will grow up and learn about the political tenacity of Margaret Thatcher. They’ll read about President Pratibha Patil in India or President Dilma Vana Linhares Rousseff in Brazil. Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, or Mother Theresa. All, women who strive to make a difference in the lives of the people they serve.

Canada is actively advocating for a greater role of women in the countries of the Arab Spring as well. The transformative change that is underway throughout the Middle East and North Africa is an expression of people power; and all people – including women and minorities – must share in its benefits.

In the final days of the Gaddafi regime, as the dusk fell on four decades of brutality and oppression in Libya, I had the chance to visit Tripoli. There, I made it a point, in keeping with our commitments, to meet with women’s rights activists, and hear their views on how they could help a new Libya emerge – a Libya that respects freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law – for all. Their ideas were inspiring, their determination unyielding. In every meeting with Libya’s Transitional Council since, I have raised the importance of the role of women in the on-going transition to a free, more open, democratic society. As I said, this is a priority for Canada. I believe it will happen in Libya. It is vital to their success.

In my time as Foreign Minister, I have found there are topics that are not easily raised with one’s counterparts and times when diplomacy must be balanced with tough, direct talk in the course of frank discussions. This is a challenge for all who wish to lead in freedom-loving nations. For we cannot be selective in which basic human rights we defend. Nor can we be arbitrary in whose rights we protect.

Sadly, this is something lost on too many in positions of power in too many countries. Progressive countries like Canada and the United Kingdom embrace pluralism and draw strength from our differences. We don’t compromise on basic rights. Nor are these rights the privilege of a select few. We stand firm on the ideals and principles that have made our countries economically prosperous and rich with diversity. Those who would attempt to spread hate and intolerance within our borders are subject to the rule of law – one that respects our common values and our people’s freedoms. This is something that some of our Commonwealth cousins wilfully ignore.

Sadly, in far too many places – basic human rights are afforded to only a chosen few. Dozens of Commonwealth countries currently have regressive and punitive laws on the books that criminalize homosexuality. In some countries, these laws are unenforced hang-overs from an earlier era; in others, they are actively implemented. The criminalization of homosexuality is incompatible with the fundamental Commonwealth value of human rights.

Throughout most of the Commonwealth Caribbean, colonial-era laws remain on the books that could impose draconian punishments on gay people simply for being gay. This contributes to social stigma and violence against gay people. Nowhere is the plight of gays and lesbians more evident than in Uganda, and no other story illustrates this plight better than the life and death of Ugandan gay rights activist David Kato.

David worked tirelessly as an advocate for Sexual Minorities Uganda, an organization fighting for full legal and social equality for gay people in Uganda. The work of such an organization is exceedingly difficult in such a poisoned environment. Fear for personal safety and the likelihood of being ostracised by society is a daily reality for the gay community in Uganda. Against those odds, David faced constant death threats because of his work and his sexual orientation.

In 2010, a Ugandan tabloid newspaper published on its front page the pictures and names of known homosexuals in their country – with a headline that beamed “Hang Them.” David was in one of those pictures. In January of last year, almost one year ago today, David was brutally bludgeoned to death with a hammer, in his own home. David Kato’s life and death is but one tragic story, in but one country. And although his murderers were brought to justice, this darkness exists for homosexual men and women elsewhere.

However, there are slivers of light. Rwanda and South Africa have been leaders in protecting and promoting the fundamental rights of gays and lesbians. Slivers of light. Winston Churchill once said; “It is no good using hard words among friends about the past, and reproaching one another for what cannot be recalled. It is the future, not the past that demands our earnest and anxious thought.”

To the future we look. We will continue to press countries in the Commonwealth to live up to their international obligations, and uphold the basic contract any government should have with its people. To inform, to educate, to be tolerant, and accepting. We don’t accept that because a state isn’t directly complicit in this type of intolerance that its hands are clean. We firmly believe it is the role of the state to protect its people, to inform their people about the irreparable harm intolerance and hate cause, and to accept those who may be different into their society. Whether the difference be gender, sexuality, or faith.

Although we as Canadians are across miles of ocean, we will not be spectators to tragedies that fly in the face of our fundamental values. We will not sit in our far off homes and plead ignorance to crimes against those who seek the same freedoms we enjoy.As citizens of a global community, we have a solemn duty to defend the vulnerable, to give voice to the voiceless, to challenge the aggressor, and to promote and protect human rights and human dignity, at home and abroad.

Among the Commonwealth – and other multi-lateral organizations to which we are party – our nationalities are many, but we share one humanity. At the United Nations this past September, I spoke of a new chapter in Canadian Foreign Policy. Our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, and I have said time and time again, that Canada will no longer ‘go along just to get along’. We will speak out on the issues that matter to Canadians – whether it is the role and treatment of women around the world, or the persecution of gays, lesbians, bisexual or transgendered persons, or the cowardly and targeted attacks of those who pray in sanctity of churches, temples, mosques or synagogues.

Canada will speak out. American President Roosevelt once said: “Where freedom of religion has been attacked, the attack has come from sources opposed to democracy. Where democracy has been overthrown, the spirit of free worship has disappeared. And where religion and democracy have vanished, good faith and reason in international affairs have given way to strident ambition and brute force.”

In China, we see Roman Catholic priests, Christian Clergy and their laity, worshipping outside of state-sanctioned boundaries, who are continually subject to raids, arrests, and detention. We see Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetan Buddhists, and Uyghur Muslims face harassment, and physical intimidation. These abhorrent acts fly in the face of our core principals, our core values. And nowhere is religious intolerance more present than in Iran. Baha’i’s and Christians are consistently threatened with death and torture simply for believing. Simply for their beliefs.

In September of this past year, a Christian Pastor was threatened with death if he refused to renounce his beliefs. And he is not alone in this. In Egypt, we have been witness to gruesome attacks against Coptic Christians. Attacks in the very places they hold to be sacred. Places of peace and tranquility. We watched as Egyptians rallied with the Coptic community. Muslims and Copts marched shoulder to shoulder into Tahrir square chanting “We are all Egyptians”. Something truly inspiring.

Egyptians recognize that they will not have any freedoms, if they cannot be free to simply believe. Taken from the famous words of Benazir Bhutto; You can imprison a man, but not a belief. You can even kill a man, but you can’t kill their beliefs. Canada, with its allies, like the United Kingdom, will continue to push for these fundamental freedoms, for all people.

It is where our long histories have led us. It is what we have learned along the way. It is how are people are free.Free to believe. Free to love. Free to be.

In Canada, our Prime Minister committed to establish an Office of Religious Freedom in short order. This Office will be under my department’s purview, and will report directly to me. This action should signal to the world that Canada attaches great importance to religious freedom, and we will speak out when we see religious intolerance and hate being spread.

We remember the words of Winston Churchill; “It is the future, not the past that demands our earnest and anxious thought.” We need a new way forward, together. We gain nothing out of hate, or intolerance. Freedom, and liberty come at a cost, and we know this all too well. We are witness every day to atrocities around the world. And our people demand that the voiceless have a voice.

One of South Africa’s great novelists Alan Paton wrote, in the early days of what would become known to the world as apartheid:“Dawn has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.” As I stand here addressing you in the Mandela room, I am reminded that Canada was proud to be among the global leaders in the fight against apartheid until brighter days finally dawned over South Africa. Darkness still lives. And so the fight for what is right and just persists.

Few people can change the course of history, but each of us, working towards furthering human dignity, respect, and tolerance, will be able to write the history of our generation, and a foundation for the world we leave behind. How we do that, really matters. Voluntary associations like the 54-nation Commonwealth can and must be propelled forward as an agent for democracy, rule of law, human rights and development. That reflects the true value of the British democracy that has spanned the continents and shaped the world. It must be more frank, more direct and more precise in its initiatives and voice. Good offices that are silent and ineffectual advance no cause. Complacency in defence of human rights rarely comforts anyone but the oppressor. Speaking out may be controversial-but silence is the accomplice of wrong doing. It is not an option!

That is why Canada strongly suppoprts the recent Commonwealth reform report by the Eminent Persons Group last October. That is why we continue to press for further progress on the recommendations still under consideration, especially those on human rights, HIV/AIDS, poverty abatement and religious freedom. That is why I recently appointed Canadian Senator Hugh Segal to represent Canada as our Envoy to the Commonwealth.

Some of the world’s poorest and smallest countries are among our Commonwealth cousins. Solidarity with them, in support of enterprise, investment, aid and development absolutely requires firm resolve on the issues of disagreement and discord. We see the important role the Commonwealth can play, and we cherish the fundamental values it was built upon. That is why we cannot sit idly by and watch these values be undermined.

This institution and the countries that make up the Commonwealth must be accountable for their actions, and their inactions. The equality of all under the Crown – regardless of gender, religion, colour, race, age or orientation – is one of those traditions and principles that have moved mountains in the last 60 years under Her Majesty’s reign. This continuity of values and symbolism is fundamental to all the 2.1 billion residents of the Commonwealth.

Our common cause must be a universal respect for freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. We don’t make this our cause to appease our constituencies. We make this our cause because we have seen the goodness of humankind. And the prosperity of its people. We know it can exist. For all people. That is what we strive for. That is what we aim to achieve. That is Canada’s foreign policy. And we pledge to be a willing partner, and a leader by example.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/free-to-believe-free-to-love-free-to-be/feed/36Bombs on the beachhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/bombs-on-the-beach/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/bombs-on-the-beach/#commentsThu, 27 Oct 2011 12:00:35 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=220699Local officials in England have discovered 26 munitions, such as an anti-submarine depth charge, on a naturist beach

]]>Nudists should watch where they sunbathe on the Isle of Sheppey, off the south coast of England. After local officials discovered 26 munitions, such as an anti-submarine depth charge, on the naturist beach, bomb disposal experts of the Royal Navy were called in to sweep the area in October for other hidden explosives. In two days they pulled another 61 bombs, including high-explosive mortar shells, from the beach, which certainly lived up to its nickname of Shellness.

The area near the beach was a bombing range until 1937, and then an aircraft gunnery range during the Second World War, reports the local Sheppey Gazette. While the size of the haul caught officials off guard, bombs wash onto British beaches with regularity. Centuries of naval battles and ship sinkings have left the nation’s coastal waters so littered with unexploded munitions that Royal Navy disposal teams are on duty 365 days of the year. They’re likely to be back to the Isle of Sheppey. Though none of the recent haul of bombs is believed to come from the SS Richard Montgomery, which sank nearby during the Second World War, the wreck is still a threat. The munitions ship was carrying 1,400 tonnes of explosives.

]]>British Prime Minister David Cameron has embarked on a rather humourous endeavour to try and save the United Kingdom from porn. Earlier this week, it was reported that, at Cameron’s behest, the four largest Internet service providers in the UK would begin an opt-in program where they would automatically block porn websites unless customers explicitly said they wanted them.

No sooner did the ink (real or virtual) dry on that story than those same ISPs—BT, TalkTalk, Sky and Virgin—started talking about how the system would have no effect. The opt-in process, it turns out, will apply only to brand new customers, which means very little because only about 5 per cent of people change service providers in a given quarter.

That’s not exactly the best way to say it will have no effect—after all, at that rate it will only take 10 quarters or two-and-a-half years to block the majority of the country from porn. Still, the ISPs’ chafing at the idea is what makes Cameron’s effort humourous because it’s doomed to fail for a host of reasons.

First, there are the freedom of speech issues. The Australian government’s effort to enact a similar ban has hit all kinds of snags, from coalition partners refusing to support it to several big ISPs refusing to play ball, even with something as universally deplorable as child porn. Things have gotten downright silly Down Under, with the banning efforts extending to erotica that features small-breasted women, which supposedly encourages pedophilia. The resulting joke, of course, is that Australians want their porn stars to have big boobs.

Then there are the logistical problems. How, exactly, does something qualify for the banned list?

Banning porn on the Internet is ultimately a fool’s errand. It’s here to stay and, while laws and technology can try to help, in the end its parents’ responsibility to ensure their kids aren’t getting to where they shouldn’t be.

If a country were to successfully ban online porn, however, it’s a safe bet its Internet traffic would nosedive. While accurate numbers are tough to come by, there are some hints that suggest pornography still makes up a good chunk of traffic. Five of the 100 most-visited websites (that are in English) are porn-related, according to Alexa rankings, while Ogi Ogas – author of A Billion Wicked Thoughts – says about 13% of web searches are for erotic content.

Applying this chain of logic to Canada, if Internet providers here really were worried about congestion on their networks, they wouldn’t be enacting usage-based billing to try and slow consumption with the likes of Netflix. They’d be trying to get porn banned.

]]>The English national rugby team kicked off its World Cup campaign in unconvincing fashion last month, limping to a win over underdogs Argentina in Dunedin, N.Z. The Englishmen struggled for points and played from behind for much of the match. But outside the stadium, where tens of thousands of travelling English fans gathered, scoring was not expected to be a problem.

Prostitution is legal in New Zealand, and brothels there reportedly doubled their condom orders ahead of the six-week Rugby World Cup. “Whenever I hear an English accent,” madame Mary Brennan told Agence France-Presse, “I know there’ll be some good business there.” The English are not the only fans in town. Brennan says she’s had bookings from South Africa, Ireland and even Canada.

As for the players themselves, the English, at least, aren’t averse to a little bad behaviour. Members of the team were photographed at a dwarf-themed pub night ahead of a pool match with Georgia. Management assured the public that, contrary to reports, no midgets were thrown. Captain Mike Tindall, meanwhile, who recently married the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips, was said to be “just friends” with a mystery blond he was spotted with at the bar.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/playing-safe/feed/0London’s long, hot summerhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/londons-long-hot-summer/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/londons-long-hot-summer/#commentsSun, 14 Aug 2011 22:30:05 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=208711What role did social media play in the violence?

What began as a peaceful public vigil outside a north London police station last Saturday rapidly morphed into several days of rampaging protests—a frightening flashpoint in a season of increasing unrest in the British capital. By midday Monday, more than 200 protesters had been arrested in skirmishes that left scores of officers injured and several down-at-heel neighbourhoods severely damaged by fire and theft. And there was no end in sight. By Monday evening, riot police were busy in Oxford Circus, and BBC commentators were advising Londoners to stay indoors—meanwhile, violence had erupted in Birmingham, Liverpool and other large cities.

How did it all start? The initial protest in Tottenham, a socio-economically depressed and ethnically mixed district in the city’s north end, was organized in response to the shooting earlier last week of Mark Duggan. The local man lived in a nearby housing project and was, depending on which sources you believe, either a peace-loving family man or an active gang member. There are reports that he was carrying a weapon, allegedly a starter’s pistol converted to fire live ammunition; Duggan’s death came after a minicab he was in was stopped during a pre-planned police operation.

What’s inarguable is that police were involved in the shooting, though it’s still not known who actually killed Duggan. Why the protest turned violent is similarly murky: at least one witness claimed it all began when a 16-year-old girl was viciously attacked after throwing a champagne bottle at officers, yet others blamed unsubstantiated rumours circulated on Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger claiming that Duggan was murdered in an unprovoked, execution-style shooting.

During the initial flare-up in Tottenham on Saturday night, mobs of balaclava-clad young people tore through the streets after dark, setting fire to homes and businesses, and kicking in windows and looting shops, while a woefully unprepared police force looked on helplessly—and, according to some critics, passively allowed parts of the neighbourhood to burn.

The following night, crowds of enraged youths clashed with riot police in neighbourhoods all over the city. Police have downplayed this second wave of outbursts—“copycat violence”—but claim the existence of a scheme organized by criminal elements who intentionally used social media to incite mob rule.

Whatever the case, it’s clear the initial public grievance over Duggan death quickly evolved into something far more pernicious and opportunistic. Duggan’s relatives, though frustrated by police handling of the case, told the media they do not condone the riots and called for an end to the violence.

The police have been criticized both for reacting too aggressively and for not doing enough to stop the initial riot. But others, like Kit Malthouse, deputy mayor of London and chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, lambasted rioters themselves. They are, he said, merely “looking for the opportunity to steal and set fire to buildings and create a sense of mayhem, whether they’re anarchists or part of organized gangs or just feral youth, frankly, who fancy a new pair of trainers.” And indeed, there were widespread reports of youths gleefully hauling shopping carts full of stolen booty away from retailers like Foot Locker. Looters also, reportedly, fried up their own burgers and fries at a ransacked McDonald’s.

But some left-wing commentators, such as former mayor Ken Livingstone, framed unrest as a reaction to the Tory-led government’s recent cuts to social spending and likened the riots to those that plagued Britain when Margaret Thatcher imposed similar policies. But while it’s true that youth unemployment in many of the affected areas is high compared to the national average, the real root of the tension appears to be between residents of neighbourhoods like Tottenham—poor, crime-infested and with a large Afro-Caribbean population that claims to be the target of discrimination and abuse—and the police force, which is feeling the heat during this summer of scandals. (Just last month, the top two commanders were forced to resign amid accusations of misconduct in the phone-hacking scandal involving Rupert Murdoch’s former tabloid News of the World.)

On Monday night, while fire crews battled blazes across London, Prime Minister David Cameron returned from his Tuscan holiday, pledging to “do everything necessary to restore order to Britain’s streets” and announcing that Parliament would be recalled on Thursday. Reports were swirling that police were to be given permission to use plastic bullets and armoured vehicles.

As the melee continued, law-abiding citizens watched their homes and livelihoods go up in flames, in some cases quite literally. Many seem to feel, as one Tottenham bus driver put it, that unless something changes in the capital, “This will happen again. These kids don’t care. They don’t have to pay for this damage. Working people do. What do they have to lose?”

Nevertheless, on Tuesday, hundreds of Londoners gathered in Hackney, Clapham and other besieged neighbourhoods, armed, unlike the nighttime mobs, with brooms and garbage bags. Within hours they’d swept the streets and boarded up damaged shops. When Mayor Boris Johnson came to check out their efforts he was greeted by a chant: “Where’s your broom?”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/photo-gallery-riots-break-out-in-north-london/feed/0Photo gallery: Obama goes to Europehttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/photo-gallery-obama-goes-to-europe/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/photo-gallery-obama-goes-to-europe/#respondTue, 24 May 2011 21:27:28 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=193865The U.S. president pops into Ireland for a beer, England for a state dinner with the Queen

Some justice at last

It’s been over three years since Robert Dziekanski died at the Vancouver airport after RCMP used Tasers to subdue him. Now B.C.’s attorney general has laid perjury charges against the four officers involved for allegedly giving misleading testimony during the exhaustive Braidwood inquiry. While some, including Dziekanski’s mother, Zofia Cisowski, are disappointed the charges don’t relate to the tasering itself, Cisowski still applauded the move. The wheels of the law may be slow, but they do keep moving, and in this sad case the charges offer at least some measure of justice.

Harnessing hot air

Energy sources such as wind and solar could provide 80 per cent of the world’s power supply within four decades if governments provide the cash and policies to make it happen. That is the landmark conclusion of a UN panel that says it’s not too late to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a “safe” level. In the meantime, farmers are enjoying the heat. According to separate research, Canadian crops have been largely spared from the scourge of climate change—and our historically hard-luck farmers are profiting from increased demand.

Prize catch

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded this year’s Peace Prize to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, it was a blow to China’s human rights record. But the big winner may be Scottish fish farmers. In a fit of pique, China has stopped buying salmon from Norway—its biggest supplier—and signed a deal with Scotland. Perhaps that contributed to the unprecedented majority won by Alex Salmond’s Scottish National Party in the May 5 elections. Good news for nationalist politicians, not so much for fish.

It’s all relative

A NASA study has confirmed two of the “most profound predictions” about Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: that space and time are both warped and pulled by Earth’s gravity. Astrophysicists say the results, based on data measured by an orbiting space probe, will have implications “beyond our planet.” In other physics news: engineers have developed a golf ball that won’t slice. Now there’s a breakthrough we can relate to.

Bad news

Parivartan Sharma/Reuters

Revolution relapse

In the post-Mubarak era, Egypt is transitioning, but to what? Christians and Muslims clashed in Cairo, leaving 12 dead and two churches in smoldering ruins, amid signs Islamist hard-liners are asserting their power. At the same time, Syria continued its crackdown against anti-government protesters, killing scores of people and injuring hundreds, while in Libya, forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi hammered rebels. Clearly the fight is far from over for the pro-democracy movement across the Middle East.

Retirement blues

Tens of thousands more baby boomers will face retirement without a company pension plan, Statistics Canada reported this week. Since the recession, membership in private sector plans has fallen below that of the public sector for the first time ever. Which is why Canadians should be cheering the Canada Pension Plan’s tripling of its 2009 investment in Internet-calling-company Skype, recently purchased by Microsoft for US$8.5 billion. Unless you work for the civil service or at a university, the CPP may be all the help you will get.

Red carded

Lord Triesman, the chair of England’s failed bid for the 2018 World Cup of soccer, is alleging at least four FIFA members demanded bribes for their votes, including a knighthood for Paraguay’s representative. Trinidad’s football head wanted $2.5 million cash for an “educational centre.” London’s Sunday Times reports two West African delegates were paid $1.5 million to support Qatar’s winning bid. And in France, the national team is embroiled in scandal after it emerged officials considered quotas to limit the number of African and Arab-born players on their development squads. The ugly side to the beautiful game.

Unholy bonds

A good marriage isn’t necessarily built on love or even physical attraction, suggests new research in the Journal of Politics. Among the strongest shared traits between U.S. spouses is their political attitudes, the study found. The political bond forms early in marriages, but it’s not always enough to keep them together. Just ask political power-couple Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, who separated this week.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/good-news-bad-news-may-5-12-2011-2/feed/0‘The Ignatieffs were not typical immigrants’http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-ignatieffs-were-not-typical-immigrants/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-ignatieffs-were-not-typical-immigrants/#respondSat, 19 Mar 2011 01:15:56 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=178331In a missive this evening, apparently in response to this video, the Conservative party takes issue with Mr. Ignatieff’s family heritage and apparently seeks to debate who can rightfully claim…

]]>In a missive this evening, apparently in response to this video, the Conservative party takes issue with Mr. Ignatieff’s family heritage and apparently seeks to debate who can rightfully claim to be an immigrant.

While the Ignatieffs have made the most of their coming to Canada in their respective fields, they have never ceased to enjoy great privilege, as a function of the financial and educational resources and social status they brought with them, and which are theirs to this day. The Ignatieff immigrant experience is one of significant wealth, first-rate educations and privilege. Very few Canadian families can claim this “immigrant experience.”

Mr. Ignatieff’s father, George, served for nearly 50 years in the Canadian civil service. The website for Citizenship and Immigration Canada describes his life story here. For whatever it is worth—assuming one wishes to engage in a debate over the exact socioeconomic status of a politician’s late father and the worthiness of such—that biography includes the observation that, upon arriving in Canada, his family had “barely enough money for basic necessities.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-ignatieffs-were-not-typical-immigrants/feed/0Play us out, musical tie guyhttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/play-us-out-musical-tie-guy/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/play-us-out-musical-tie-guy/#commentsFri, 21 Jan 2011 22:50:28 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=168410Whatever the moaning about how much more civilized and mannered and eloquent is the British House, we can at least say that our Houses is free of musical neckwear.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBWbVT22JBE…

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/play-us-out-musical-tie-guy/feed/8Losing is in the eye of the beholderhttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/losing-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/losing-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/#respondTue, 18 Jan 2011 16:30:04 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=167404In his chat with Mr. Mansbridge, the Prime Minister again asserts a rule for coalition government.Of course, and David Cameron’s an interesting example because they had that debate there, …

]]>In his chat with Mr. Mansbridge, the Prime Minister again asserts a rule for coalition government.

Of course, and David Cameron’s an interesting example because they had that debate there, and what I think the public concluded was undemocratic and not really legitimate was the coalition of parties that lost an election. Mr. Cameron won the election. And then was able to form a coalition.

It’s unclear if Mr. Harper intends this judgment of legitimacy to be applied to the governments of Israel, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, not to mention the Liberal government that oversaw the province of Ontario between 1985 and 1987.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/losing-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/feed/0Not in my backyardhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/not-in-my-backyard-2/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/not-in-my-backyard-2/#commentsThu, 16 Dec 2010 20:20:15 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=163095Public sex appears to be on the rise in England, and buttoned-down country folk want it to stop

Sir Beville Stanier, nephew of the Queen’s late crown equerry and owner of an 800-hectare estate in Oxfordshire, was not the first one to notice the public orgies taking place on his property. “My tenants stumbled on the scene after dark and called to let me know,” he explained in an interview. “I’ve been down there myself in the daytime and the ground is littered with used condoms and tissues. It really is quite unpleasant.”

The orgy in question was not a random occurrence, but part of an established British activity known as “dogging,” in which participants meet to have—and observe—sex in parked cars and wooded lots. The phenomenon is hardly new. The BBC reported instances of the dogging “sex craze” back in 2003, with the news that “the Internet and text messaging are fuelling a practice which involves unprotected sex with strangers in public parks.”

Since then, however, the subculture has grown into a full-blown social nuisance, in which certain public and private lots, usually accessed from motorway lay-bys (a.k.a. rest stops), have been overtaken by swingers and voyeurs who arrange to hook up anonymously by cover of night. Aided by social media sites, the phenomenon appears to be on the rise, and many English country folk are decidedly not amused.

Some residents and landowners are lobbying local councils to up policing or close down lay-bys, while other communities, like the town of Puttenham, Surrey, are almost reluctantly tolerant. Police there have designated a popular wooded lot a “public-sex environment,” and put up a sign politely asking people not to engage in “activities of an unacceptable nature”—to no apparent avail.

Last spring in Darwen, Lancashire, the local council cut down 6,000 mature trees on a popular spot in an attempt to deter the practice. Other communities have been forced to deforest picnic grounds, demolish disused buildings and install fencing.

Some residents have argued for the installation of CCTV cameras and motion-sensor lighting. But opponents say such measures would be too expensive and could even backfire, given that many doggers are exhibitionists. One Cotswolds recreation area has become so notorious that pranksters had a fake sign installed by the motorway that read, “Official Dogging Area.”

So why aren’t local authorities cracking down? The problem is that dogging falls under a legal grey area and police are reluctant to press charges. While indecent exposure remains against the law, unobserved public nudity or sex is technically legal. Add to this Britain’s unpleasant history with persecuting homosexuals: gay sex was a felony in parts of the U.K. until the early ’80s, and since then many men have been controversially busted for having sex in public bathrooms (known as “cottaging”). The result is a legal climate in which the authorities are loath to get involved when it comes to public predilections in the bedroom—or the countryside.

Enter the words “U.K. and dogging” into Google and you will find a proliferation of websites depicting pale, paunchy middle-aged folks in ski jackets and rubber boots engaging in outdoor sex acts. Many provide forums to meet, and maps (Dogging After Dark lists over 5,000 dogging spots in Britain). Dogging may be the sexual equivalent of an English day at the beach: cold, damp and decidedly perverse—to all but those who enjoy it.

Professor Richard Byrne, who teaches at Harper Adams University College in Shropshire, has spent years studying the phenomenon and considers it a modern extension of the English pastoral tradition of engaging in youthful, intimate relations outdoors. “The ‘lovers’ lane,’ ” he writes, in a 2006 paper published in the Canadian academic journal Leisure, “is a place of variable geography, which for many users simply fulfills a functional need—it is a private place to go and have sex.”

As for why dogging is back in the news today, Byrne blames advances in technology. “It’s much more accessible now than when it first started a few years ago,” he explained, “because mobile Web access allows for greater information flow.” He also adds that police deterrents may have pushed doggers to new areas, causing outcry in different communities.

Like many Britons, Simon Ellis, director of the 2009 independent film Dogging: a Love Story, is divided on whether dogging should be legal. “Should it be illegal to make out in your car, which has surely happened since cars were invented?” he asks. “Or should it just be illegal if there is someone standing there [masturbating] at the window because then it becomes something entirely different? It’s certainly not for me—but I’d say that so long as it is consensual, and not in a location that’s likely to be happened upon by an unsuspecting public, then what’s the harm?”

Sir Beville Stanier vehemently disagrees. After spending thousands of pounds clearing bush and repairing fences on his property (they always get broken down again), the peer has taken to lobbying his local council to shut down the lay-by next to his property. Enough, he says, is bloody well enough. “There are all sorts of things people are more than welcome do in their own homes, but they don’t need public grounds for that purpose,” he said. “And they certainly don’t need to be doing it on my estate.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/not-in-my-backyard-2/feed/7David Cameron: Revolution in bluehttp://www.macleans.ca/news/revolution-in-blue/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/revolution-in-blue/#respondTue, 07 Dec 2010 14:20:15 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=161336He has partnered with the left, but Cameron has a radical, conservative, vision for England

If insanity can be defined as doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and the Conservative Party that made him its leader, aren’t all that innovative—merely lucid. And yet, for most of a decade before Cameron was elected party leader in 2005, Conservative Party members pinned their hopes on a succession of men who campaigned on issues, such as crime and suspicion of the European Union, that resonated with the party’s base but failed to expand its reach. In 2002, party chair Theresa May said the Conservatives were perceived as the “nasty party.” The term stuck, probably because she was right. “We were in danger of becoming an elderly debating society,” one Tory city councillor told Maclean’s.

David Cameron knew Conservatives had to change to win. He convinced the rest of the party with a speech at the Tory leadership convention, promising to fight for a “modern, compassionate conservatism,” and beating out the presumed favourite, veteran MP David Davis. Cameron then set about trying to decontaminate the Conservative Party brand nationwide by focusing on issues like the environment and letting old Tory obsessions such as fox hunting fall away. Riding his bike to work—albeit trailing a limousine carrying his briefcase—was transparent and hokey, but didn’t hurt.

The Conservatives entered the May 2010 general election with 140 fewer seats than the governing Labour Party. They made significant gains, but still fell 20 seats short of the 326 needed for an overall majority. David Cameron was therefore forced to form a coalition government with the third-place, and left-leaning, Liberal Democrats.

He no doubt would have preferred to be governing with a majority, but Cameron has used his ostensibly weak position of forced co-operation to his advantage. The Liberal Democrats provide Cameron’s Conservatives with ideological cover. “It gives that sense that it’s a national government,” says Charlie Beckett, director of Polis, a think tank at the London School of Economics. The Tories need only point to their supposedly left-wing partners to demonstrate their own moderation.

The deal hasn’t worked out so well for the Liberal Democrats, and for Nick Clegg, the party’s leader and Britain’s deputy prime minister. Many who voted for the Liberal Democrats see its partnership with the Tories as a betrayal and are abandoning it. Support has plummeted since the election. “That’s kind of good news for Cameron,” says Beckett, “because it means Nick Clegg won’t cause too much trouble.”

He certainly hasn’t so far. Cameron has made a few compromises, such as agreeing to a referendum to change Britain’s voting system, but Cameron is clearly the dominant partner. He’s using that position to its fullest by making deep and broad cuts to government spending on everything from defence to welfare. Britain is in debt and its economy is wobbly. Cameron is therefore driven in part by a simple desire for fiscal restraint. But there’s more to it than that. Cameron believes in decentralizing power and wants citizens to take responsibility for jobs normally handled by the state—a goal he’s accomplishing by giving citizens greater influence over local schools and police, for example.

It’s part of what Cameron describes as a “Big Society,” in which power is shifted from “elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the streets.” “The Big Society,” he said, describing the idea in a speech in Liverpool this summer, “is about a huge culture change where people in their everyday lives, in their homes, their neighbourhoods, and their workplace don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face, but instead will feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities.”

He can be persuasive. But critics who say Cameron is simply dressing up the knife he’s using to eviscerate Britain’s public sector have a point. Regardless of how they’re sold, the cuts will hurt. Cameron likes to say that he admires former Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher but isn’t like her. He’s right in the sense that Thatcher was more openly partisan. Cameron, however, is pursuing an equally radical agenda.

What’s working in Cameron’s interest, at least for now, is the belief that the cuts are necessary. “He’s taking some bold steps that have to be made,” said Margaret Barnes, a bookstore owner in Cameron’s home riding of Witney. “We need someone to grab hold of the problems and get them sorted.”

Not everyone agrees, of course. Tens of thousands of students recently demonstrated in London to protest government plans to cut funding to universities, and to allow universities to almost triple tuition fees, from $5,400 to $14,750 a year. Some stormed a downtown building housing the Conservative Party headquarters, smashing its windows.

Still, many Britons are willing to give Cameron a chance and take the lumps that are coming in the hopes they might be worth it. Most polls show the Conservatives up slightly since the election—though also even with Labour, which has benefited from the Liberal Democrats’ collapse.

“We’ll go through, probably in the next two or three years, some tough times,” Mary Macleod, a newly elected Conservative MP told Maclean’s. “And then we’ll pull out of that. So it will be a rocky road and a difficult journey along the way. I think the change we deliver at the end of it will be as large as there’s ever been.”

Gayle MacKay knows what it’s like to live beyond her means. The 32-year-old public relations professional has spent most of the last decade scraping by on a salary of under $30,000 a year while living in one of the most expensive cities in the world: London, England. Like millions of other Britons, MacKay has lived either at home with her parents or in shared accommodation, and despite steady employment, found herself barely able to make ends meet. She’s recently relocated to Barcelona, where, she jokes, “it’s the done thing to be impoverished,” but in London the pressure to spend money she didn’t have was relentless. “Every month by the time payday rolled around I would literally be right down to my last penny—and when I say last penny I mean I was up to my big overdraft limit. It was scary.”

MacKay is part of a new generation of Britons who, despite the high cost of living and low wages, have eschewed frugality—once a time-honoured tradition in a nation that finally ended food rationing in 1954.

A new study conducted by the insurance company Bright Grey has found that nearly seven million Britons are knowingly living well beyond their means, and a further five million don’t bother to budget. Even more surprising in a country afflicted by widespread unemployment and radical austerity measures, 82 per cent of respondents claimed they had not changed their lifestyle spending at all during the last 12 months.

The study examined two segments of British society: those who had been affected by job losses and government cutbacks, and those who hadn’t been affected and might even be better off because of low interest rates. Both groups, they found, were dramatically overspending. The first accrued debt in an effort to maintain a lifestyle they could no longer afford, while the second group seemed to be spending money while they still could.

So what prompted such a radical change in the spending habits of a country known for cold-water flats and coin-operated heaters?

Ten years of easy credit, says Roger Edwards, marketing director for Bright Grey. “Frugality is a national stereotype but it’s no longer accurate,” he said in an interview. “The British people did have that mentality, but the reality is that over the last 10 to 15 years we’ve noticed a huge change in consumer spending patterns and even their moral outlook as well. We’ve gone through a long period of being able to get a credit card just by signing a paper, and people got used to having whatever they wanted—that’s an extremely difficult mentality to break.”

MacKay agrees that overspending seems to be the norm among her friends, most of whom are young, educated urbanites employed in the notoriously low-paying media and arts sectors. “Having no cash never stopped me going out or shopping,” she admits. “My generation seems to be having a pretty good time of it, living in the now. I just don’t think we’re particularly good at saving up to buy a house or putting money into a pension plan when we’d much rather go out to dinner instead.”

Part of the explanation for this seize-the-day attitude toward cash can be explained by sheer lack of it. While credit has been more readily available in the last decade, wages have failed to keep up with the rising cost of living—a dangerous combination when it comes to consumer debt. “The average income in the U.K. remains at £20,000 to £25,000 a year, despite rising taxes and cost of living,” says Edwards, “and for many people that’s simply not enough to have a comfortable life.”

This economic disparity between lifestyle expectation and actual earnings has led MacKay and her friends to forgo fantasies of achieving security through fiscal restraint. “Property prices are so ridiculously high that anything we might be able to save now will be nowhere near enough to buy a house in the distant future, so we might as well have fun while we still can,” she says. (Despite a softened market, the average price for a home in greater London is still nearly $700,000—far out of reach for most wage-earning city dwellers.)

For many contemporary Britons, happiness is now defined by free-wheeling use of credit. Convincing them otherwise might be a hard sell. But last week, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that in the wake of his government’s radical austerity measures, he has commissioned the Office of National Statistics to conduct a survey on the nation’s general well-being, in an effort to place Britain on a “happiness index.” The initiative is intended to measure national prosperity and success on a non-GDP-based scale. (Canada and France are said to be looking into similar initiatives.)

Edwards admits the impulsive consumer mindset is hard to break, but warns that people living beyond their means ought to think about the financial risks involved—for instance, what would happen if their source of income dried up? As an insurance salesman, he is committed to encouraging Britons to be more risk averse and return to their frugal roots. “We’re not saying people should sit in their kitchens eating bread and water—but they do need a bit of a reality check.”

The British are leaving Germany. British Prime Minister David Cameron recently announced his intention to remove the last British troops, after 65 years on German soil, by 2020—15 years earlier than expected. The decision comes amidst the U.K. government’s struggle to tackle its budget deficit and restructure its army, which has maintained a presence in Germany since the Second World War. An estimated 20,000 soldiers and 23,000 dependants and British civilians currently work at 12 bases in North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony, many of them living as part of the local communities, and married to Germans.

The early withdrawal could be a blow to the German economy, which draws in an estimated $1.8 billion from the British presence each year. The town of Bergen is preparing for what Mayor Rainer Prokop calls a devastating situation. Prokop estimated the population of 16,000 would drop by a third once the British troops left, and between 20 and 40 per cent of local business could go under. “This is the most severe upheaval for us since the Second World War,” Prokop told the German news website The Local.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/auf-wiedersehen-deutschland/feed/0Goodbye to Sherwood?http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/goodbye-to-sherwood/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/goodbye-to-sherwood/#commentsThu, 11 Nov 2010 13:00:18 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=156689"Valuable forest being sold to private developers, will be an unforgiveable act of environmental vandalism"

In an attempt to raise billions in funds for Britain’s “Big Society,” David Cameron’s government is allegedly planning to sell half of Britain’s government-owned forests–including the stomping grounds of Robin Hood and Maid Marian: Sherwood Forest. The land will be sold to private companies that will build holiday villages, golf courses, and begin commercial logging operations: legislation that governs protection of the forests, some of which dates back to the Magna Carta of 1215, will likely be changed to grant private firms the right to log.

The Telegraph reports that a third of the land would be transferred to private ownership between 2011 and 2015, and the rest would be sold by 2020. The revenue from the forest sales will be directed toward government departments that were worst hit by Britain’s new austerity program, under which government spending is to be cut by 19 per cent. Opposition to a forest sell-off is mounting: “If this means vast swathes of valuable forest being sold to private developers, it will be an unforgiveable act of environmental vandalism,” said Green MP Caroline Lucas.

Paul and Joan Dumaine on their wedding day in England on July 4, 1945 | Courtesy of The Memory Project

Click play to hear Paul Dumaine’s complete audio story

Between getting engaged and his marriage in July 1945, Paul Dumaine, an infantryman with the Fusiliers Mont-Royal, survived serious wounds on the beach in Dieppe, and three years as a prisoner of war.

I met a young woman, Joan, who I became engaged to. We didn’t want to get married because the war was going strong and I could have been hurt or killed. So we said that we would wait. On Aug. 19, 1942, I arrived in Dieppe. My fiancée had no idea where I was. The battle was poorly organized. We landed in broad daylight. We got there and the beach was ablaze. The battle was full-on. Everyone was getting killed and falling down all over the place. It was terrible.

I collapsed after an hour. My head was injured. I couldn’t walk. It was like I was paralyzed. I was bleeding. I wanted to go wash myself off in the ocean. My legs were paralyzed from the shock. I had to drag myself on my elbows to the ocean. I washed my head. There was a great big boat called a tank landing craft; a boat that carried tanks. The doors opened and the tanks came out. One of them had foundered on the beach. We used it as a shelter to hide from the Germans.

After three years as a prisoner of war, I was released. I was ill. When I got to England, I stayed in hospital for a month. Joan was still in the army. The colonel called her to his office and said, “Joan, I have some good news.” She thought it was news from her parents. “Your fiancé is in England, at Aldershot. I know that you would like to see him.” She said, “Yes, yes, yes.” “I am giving you a pass. Get dressed in civilian clothes and go see him.” I was lying in my bed. They said to me, “Dumaine, you have a visitor.” She was there. It had been three years. When I saw her, she was so beautiful. I took her in my arms.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/paul-dumaine/feed/0Never let a crisis go to wastehttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste-2/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste-2/#respondSat, 30 Oct 2010 02:28:22 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=155299In the aftermath of an international terror scare that is presently topping the news in the United States and Britain, one that necessitated the scrambling of Canadian fighter jets, the…

The Prime Minister’s Office pointed to the incident to support their decision to buy 65 F-35 fighter jets. “Whether it is the CF-18s or the F-35s, Canada’s air force needs the right equipment to protect Canadian airspace,” said Harper spokesman Dimitri Soudas. “Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals and their coalition partners would cancel the deal to buy the F-35s. They would rather use kites to defend Canada than fighter jets.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste-2/feed/0Idea alerthttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/idea-alert-35/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/idea-alert-35/#respondTue, 19 Oct 2010 15:05:14 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=152955Deborah Coyne looks abroad.We need to rethink how government should work with the social sector to overcome the inertia of a bureaucratic, rule-bound public sector. We should open up …

We need to rethink how government should work with the social sector to overcome the inertia of a bureaucratic, rule-bound public sector. We should open up public services to new providers like charities, social enterprises, and private companies with the goal of increased social innovation, diversity, and responsiveness to public need.

One model of this kind of forward thinking is Barack Obama’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. Through the Social Innovation Fund, this department is creating new partnerships among government, private capital, social entrepreneurs, and the public.

Another model, the British “Social Impact Bond,” facilitates considerable up-front funding to non-profit organizations to create successful models for helping the young or the elderly. This Dragon’s Den approach secures long-term funds for promising ideas, with public investment tied to positive social, environmental, or economic benefits.

The Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation is online here. Last month, the British government launched a pilot project aimed at prisoner reform.

Every morning at about nine, Ron Hoskins slips into his white beekeepers outfit, pulls trays out from beneath 17 of his 50 buzzing apiaries in a conservation park in Swindon, England, and painstakingly sorts through the contents with a magnifying glass. He goes home at five, and he’s often up until 2 a.m. examining his finds under a microscope. “It keeps me going,” says the 79-year-old retired heating engineer. Hoskins, who has a “beekeepers do it better” sign in his office, took up apiculture during the Second World War when he was evacuated to a country school. He’s done it ever since. His current research started when worldwide bee populations began to collapse in the mid-’90s; since then numbers have fallen by up to 60 per cent in some countries. With a full third of our diet derived from insect-pollinated plants, the decline in bee populations could be devastating to global food security. But, after more than a decade of careful breeding, Hoskins thinks he’s got the answer.

He’s hopeful because of what’s lying in the bottom of his trays: dead varroa mites, tiny parasites that latch onto the necks of bees, feeding on their blood and transmitting diseases in the process. The mites usually destroy any hive they infect and, since they started to spread from Asia in the 1960s, have arguably become the biggest threat to bee populations around the globe. “It’s quite scary,” says Chris Deaves, an executive with the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA). But Hoskins has managed to naturally make 17 of his 50 colonies mite-resistant, an achievement scientists such as Leonard Foster, a biologist at the University of British Columbia, are calling a major breakthrough. “If the bees are able to deal with varroa mites to a level where they need no human intervention,” Foster says, “they have the potential to reverse the decline in numbers.”

Beekeepers have been fighting mites with chemicals, but that harms hives and is often ineffective, especially since varroa are beginning to develop a resistance to pesticides. Hoskins discontinued their use around the time he noticed dead mites starting to pile up underneath some of his hives. He soon realized that those colonies were full of bees with a very advantageous ability: they could tell when varroa were infecting other workers, and they seemed to be helping their neighbours by killing off the mites.

Hoskins monitored the colonies and selectively bred them to spread the genetic advantage. Then, a few years later, he noticed white bits of bee larva on the piles in his trays. At first he thought the hives were infected with a new disease, but the colonies had actually developed an even stronger resistance: instead of just removing varroa from adults, the bees were also destroying larvae once they became infected with mite eggs, making it much harder for the mites to breed. “If we can interrupt that life cycle,” he says, “we’ve really done major damage. We were elated.”

Other beekeepers are working to the same end. Rob Currie, an entomologist with the University of Manitoba, has been selectively breeding bees for eight years, and created a strain that can also remove the mites from other adults, while Marla Spivak, an apiculture professor at the University of Minnesota, has just been awarded a $500,000 MacArthur grant for creating her own strain of mite-resistant bee. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture have made a similar breakthrough, as have German scientists. And bees that keep hives clean by constantly removing corpses—making it more difficult for disease to spread—are being bred at Sussex University in the U.K.

But Currie notes genetic advantages come with a trade-off. “They’re putting energy into grooming,” he explains, which can lead to a drop in honey production, making the insects less effective pollinators. “If it can’t produce honey it doesn’t have much usefulness.”

Also, because mating is very difficult to control in bees, both Foster and Deaves say there’s no guarantee the new traits will be passed on to the general population. Beekeepers in Germany have already tried and failed. But Deaves believes Hoskins has a different method that could work. “His approach is to try and do a small area well, as opposed to spreading it over a large area thinly,” he says.

The BBKA has given Hoskins $9,800 to create a batch of small, reusable nucleus hives, which will be sent to other beekeepers to establish new, stronger colonies. Once those colonies take root, the hives will be sent back, starting the routine over. It’s a slow process, but Hoskins hopes his work will someday restart the British population of feral bees—now almost non-existent—and eventually help end varroa’s stranglehold on bee numbers worldwide. “It will take years,” he says, “but this is the turnaround.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/building-a-better-bee/feed/0Soccer like art? Sure, with more fightinghttp://www.macleans.ca/general/soccer-like-art/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/soccer-like-art/#commentsWed, 23 Jun 2010 12:40:37 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=133261Soccer is billed as ‘the beautiful game,’ but like any sport it is a partisan affair—and the better for it

The World Cup had an early case of life imitating advertising on Saturday, when England goalkeeper Robert Green let a slow shot from American striker Clint Dempsey skip off his hands and into the net. The goal salvaged a tie for the U.S.A., and the deep meaning of it all could be discerned from the comparative reaction of the two countries’ tabloids.

“Hand of Clod!” screamed at least two London dailies, a reference to Diego Maradona’s infamous handball goal that put England out of the 1986 finals. Across the pond, the New York Post captured the spirit of things with its gloating front page: “USA Wins 1-1”.

All told, it was an amazingly accurate re-enactment of the epic Nike commercial that went viral shortly before the World Cup started. For the five of you who haven’t seen it, the story follows a handful of global soccer stars in action on the pitch, and flashes forward to the consequences their actions have back home. England’s Wayne Rooney blows a pass, and he’s next seen living in a trailer home and looking like the Unabomber. Seconds later, Portugual’s Cristiano Ronaldo scores on a free kick and gets a stadium named after him. Even better, he lands a guest appearance on The Simpsons.

Three minutes long and filmed at a rumoured cost of US$24 million, the ad is a frenetic exploration of the central paradox of the World Cup: on the one hand, it is billed as a great celebration of worldbeat cosmopolitanism, a sort of United Colours of FIFA campaign as directed by Peter Gabriel. At the same time, there is no avoiding the fact that the game is about winning and losing, and the fate of players’ lives and the self-confidence of entire nations hinges on what happens over the next month in South Africa.

Soccer is usually billed as “the beautiful game,” something closer to ballet in cleats than a mere sporting event. But like all sports, soccer is an essentially partisan affair, and it is pretty much impossible to be fully engaged in it without cheering for one side or another. This is what distinguishes it from the other “higher” art forms such as painting, music, or dance. It is also what motivates a lot of the anti-sports snobbery that you find, on the grounds that anything that serves as the vehicle for such regressively tribal emotions can’t possibly be a serious art form. The arts, after all, are supposed to give expression to the higher virtues of truth, beauty, and goodness. Sports, meanwhile, is for troglodytes.

And by this standard, many see soccer as the most troglodytic sport of all. That’s pretty much the conclusion drawn by Ilya Somin, an American law professor who argued recently that, unlike American professional sports, international soccer “often promotes nationalist and ethnic violence and provides propaganda fodder for repressive or corrupt governments.” He observes that pro sports in the U.S. don’t seem to engage the passions of their fans the way soccer does in other countries, and he concludes that, “on balance, it is a good thing that it doesn’t.”

There is no question that there has long been an ugly side to the beautiful game at the international level, from the 1969 “soccer war” between Honduras and El Salvador that killed 2,000 people, to the grotesque propaganda effort of the North Korean regime this year. But this isn’t an argument against soccer. Rather, it is an argument against tyranny and oppression, and it is worth exposing the reflexive anti-nationalism that underlies these sorts of arguments. On this view, all partisanship is inherently bad, and what distinguishes cheering fans in a soccer stadium from the chanting crowds at a Nuremberg rally is simply a matter of degree.

But the interesting thing about partisanship is what it can teach us about the world. One of the more surprising aspects of watching the World Cup is realizing just how much each team has a characteristic style that is often such a close mirror of the nation’s stereotypical identity. The German team’s play is clinically anal, the English game is fast and rough, and the Italian team is dramatically operatic.

And so the World Cup is a league of nations in the most literal sense, where the competition between countries masks an underlying commonality of values and purpose. For a clear example of this, look no further than South Africa itself and appreciate just what a miracle it is that the World Cup is taking place there, only 16 years after the fall of apartheid. The racist regime took over South Africa in 1948, and in 1963 the country was suspended by FIFA. A number of other organizations followed suit, and by 1970 the country was subject to a large number of overlapping sporting boycotts, including golf, tennis, cricket, and the Olympics.

These boycotts alone didn’t bring down the apartheid regime. But they did focus international pressure on the country, and by shutting its teams out of the leagues of nations, it gave widespread moral legitimacy to the armed struggle that was being waged inside the country. By making a clear distinction between right and wrong, between acceptable regimes and those that are clearly outside the global community, this was partisanship of the best sort.

A few weeks ago, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said that “South Africa hosting the World Cup is a triumph for humanity.” He’s right. Sometimes the fate of a nation does hinge on what happens on a playing field. And sometimes that’s a very good thing.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/soccer-like-art/feed/1When ancient grievances are played out on the soccer pitchhttp://www.macleans.ca/society/when-ancient-grievances-are-played-out-on-the-pitch/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/when-ancient-grievances-are-played-out-on-the-pitch/#respondFri, 18 Jun 2010 14:27:23 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=133392When the U.S. tied England, it was as good as a victory

When the U.S. tied England, it was as good as a victory HOANG DINH NAM/AFP/Getty Images

There is a very small chance that North Korea and South Korea will meet each other at this year’s World Cup. Just thinking about that possibility, however distant, offers a peculiar and dangerous thrill. A game played with a bouncy ball on a field of grass would undoubtedly affect the military situation of East Asia. Politics and football have always tended to mix explosively.

Games have stopped wars, as in the 1967 exhibition game in Lagos, starring Pele, for whom the warring factions in the Nigerian civil war called a 48-hour truce. And football has started wars too, like the 1969 “Soccer War” between El Salvador and Honduras, begun over a qualification game. The World Cup contains many rivalries whose origin, whether on or off the pitch, can be difficult to distinguish. (England and Argentina in 1986 being a prime example.) If war is politics by other means, then football is war by means of a game. The world-historical background to many of the contests on the pitch is one of the most subtle and enduring pleasures of the tournament.

But the games between mother countries and ex-colonies are a particular delight and one occurs nearly every four years. They are often the best matches, with the most at stake. When the players of Trinidad and Tobago went up against England in the round robin of 2006, they were absolutely explicit that beating the mother country was their big goal of the tournament. Unfortunately for all of us ex-colonials, the Trinis, while ferocious and brave, couldn’t manage a win. The sheer delight on the faces of the Senegalese players when they defeated France in 2002 as they danced triumphantly over their once colonial masters was one of the greatest victories in international football. Typically the battles between the colonies and their ex-overlords are great underdog battles, too, like the epic game between Angola and Portugal in 2006. This year, however, the games between the colonies and motherlands are different. The match last weekend between the United States and England and the upcoming match between Portugal and Brazil on June 25 are both games in which the colonies are the greater and more powerful nations than their colonizers. This makes the games peculiar and peculiarly exciting.

The one-one draw in the England-U.S. game amounted to a victory for America, given that the United States is an up-and-comer while Britain still hangs onto the shreds of the idea that it is a world soccer power. The truth is that both goals were bad mistakes, and all in all, it was mediocre football. The difference is this: soccer is not America’s game, as everybody knows. To make the draw even worse, the current English team is probably the best the country has fielded in a generation and the Americans matched them. It was almost like the Americans were saying, “If we wanted to, we could beat you, but because we only sort of care about this game, we’re going to let you off with a draw.”

We can hope, at least, for a better game between Portugal and Brazil. Both of these teams are legitimate global superpowers and possess superb players of the highest calibre. Seeing Cristiano Ronaldo face off against Kaka will be magnificent. It is possible, too, that this game, coming at the very end of the round robin, will really matter. Since Ivory Coast is also in that group, one strong footballing power will be going home without seeing the playoffs. If Brazil sends Portugal home, or vice versa, the historical and psychological repercussions will be massive. Both countries worship the game—a defeat would be humiliating until their next World Cup encounter, which could take up to a generation. The stakes are higher because the chances at redemption are so rare.

The political relationship between Britain and the U.S. will not, of course, be damaged by the inglorious draw. The match was revealing, though—as so many of these games are revealing—about the nature of global politics, in this case the nature of Britain’s much vaunted and entirely laughable contention that it has a “special relationship” with the United States. The game was a perfect reflection of the “specialness” of that relationship—things come out roughly even in the end, but one side cares a lot more than the other.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/when-ancient-grievances-are-played-out-on-the-pitch/feed/0Brave new worldhttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/brave-new-world/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/brave-new-world/#respondTue, 15 Jun 2010 15:04:30 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=133098The Czech Republic is expected to soon be ruled by a coalition of “losers.” Slovakia seems likely to follow. Belgium’s next government may well be a coalition that includes a…

]]>The Czech Republic is expected to soon be ruled by a coalition of “losers.” Slovakia seems likely to follow. Belgium’s next government may well be a coalition that includes a separatist party. The Netherlands faces a number of coalition options, one of them rather controversial. Britain’s coalition prepares a tough new budget. Germany’s coalition teeters on the edge.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/brave-new-world/feed/0No pressurehttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/no-pressure/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/no-pressure/#respondTue, 01 Jun 2010 17:27:21 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=129961Anne Applebaum surveys the British landscape.Unusually, this government’s fate depends not only on the normal political calculations, but also on some more basic questions about human nature. And there …

Unusually, this government’s fate depends not only on the normal political calculations, but also on some more basic questions about human nature. And there are lessons here for the rest of us. If it succeeds—if the coalition stays together, if it tackles Britain’s financial crisis, if it reforms education and welfare, if it produces a coherent foreign policy—we will know that, yes, it is possible to convert bitter partisanship into amicable bipartisanship without destroying your party or losing your soul. And if the coalition fails—well, maybe partisanship can’t be overcome after all.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/no-pressure/feed/0This is why we can’t have nice thingshttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/this-is-why-we-cant-have-nice-things-3/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/this-is-why-we-cant-have-nice-things-3/#commentsMon, 17 May 2010 17:55:34 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=126925Taylor Owen considers all the reasons a British-style coalition is not so easily replicated.Possibly the main lesson of the British coalition is procedural. Brits have once again shown Canadians …

]]>Taylor Owen considers all the reasons a British-style coalition is not so easily replicated.

Possibly the main lesson of the British coalition is procedural. Brits have once again shown Canadians that they take parliamentary democracy seriously. There was no talk of coalitions with socialists and separatists, Gordon Brown stepped aside with dignity, Mr. Cameron and Mr. Clegg authored an incredibly thorough agreement that has a legitimate chance of lasting, and the media overall treated the historic events with substance rather than gamesmanship. In short, they were adults.